So I haven't talked about the games I've been playing in a while, so I'll just cover a whole bunch in one go!
Ara Fell Enhanced Edition - This was a blind steam grab, but I really enjoyed it! It's a JRPG, but with some very interesting mechanic changes. Strangely enough, its combat system is only lightly modified versus typical JRPG. Usually that's where the innovation is, ala bravely default. Ara Fell EE instead changes looting, moving to a crafting system for equipment and items. I often do not enjoy crafting systems as they can get quite grindy but, this one avoids that trap very well. It's very low grind and used more for gating than anything else, plus it makes getting potions and other typical useables a lot easier. It's really neat. That being said, it isn't without mechanical changes. It has an ultimate move that builds between fights, very good class system and upgrade pathinig, and the very interesting twist of instant restoration after every fight so you always start fresh. It sounds like not much on paper, but combined, it adds up to a familiar yet unique combat experience that I definitely enjoyed. Anyway, in addition to mechanics, Ara Fell has a good story and some good writing behind it too! Definitely can recommend this one! Also, it has an option to double the speed of battle animations and just, yea, I just left it on. Super nice. Oh, also, I played it on Hard, and was pretty happy with it. A couple of times things got a little tight, but not super difficult otherwise. Pretty satisfying imo.
Freedom Planet - It's like classic sonic but better, but I don't really care for classic sonic, so... It's fine. Hey, I beat it with one character, which is farther than I've ever gotten in a classic sonic game!
Ace Combat 7 - My first Ace Combat game. I was quite let down. It's combat and flight are fine, though I found it suuuper easy, and the music was pretty alright if a bit generic. But the story, oh gods. "Let's introduce an interesting story and character and focus on them in this cutscene. .... and now we swap to an entirely different story staring the player character, boring mcgeneric, who's flying a plane I guess" *sigh* It had a few little interesting ideas, like the scrap queen and arsenal bird, but it never went anywhere with them. Also did I mention it was stupid easy? Maybe I've just played too much star fox and rogue squadron but it was SO easy. I got bored and didn't finish the game.
Falconeer - A breath of fresh air after Ace Combat! Great flying mechanics, neat story that I wasn't able to guess completely, and good fighting that was genuinely hard at points. All on top of its super neat zero-textures aesthetic that's just super cool! And seriously, the dev started the game to try to make a game with zero textures, and accomplished it. The entirely game is all polygons and shaders, and that's it. It gives it an entirely unique look that you won't find anywhere else. It's really inventive and looks great. It isn't perfect, like, I ran into a bit of a difficulty wall about 1/3rd of the way through the game. But after grinding a bit (and realizing the generous quit window to restart a mission without losing money, games should just stop monetary death punishment as redoing content is enough punishment as it is /rant), investing in weapons and birds, I got through it and breezed through the rest of the game. Still, it's short, and quite fun.
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - What the actual @*!?^! This game is aesthetic AF, but the game portion of it is... awkward, hella confusing, and just... not fun. Played it for about an hour then dropped it. I very much do not recommend this one.
Battle of Polytopia - A surprising one for me. It's like a tiny 4X game, designed around mobiles but with a good steam port. But I've actually played it the most on my ipad of all things. I don't really play games on my phone or ipad so I find this fact amusing. But yea, what I said is exactly what it is. It's a bite sized 4X game, and it just works. I don't play it often or that much but I've picked it up every now and then for the past couple of months and have definitely liked it a lot. Especially the DLC Elf race. They take a long time to get going but once they do, they steamroll.
Dishonored 1 and 2 - These games are close to being really good, but just don't make it. First, the good points. Sneaking is great, and combining it with powers is hella fun. Like, once I got good at the teleportation quirks of each game, I could zip in and take our guards and zip out like crazy fast and it's soooo satisfying! The gameplay is really the shining spot for these games. But everything else... First of all, they are just... they are gross. They are just gross. The aethetic is bad imo, with awkwardly large hands and feet and grossly amplified textures. They just look bad. Dishonored 2 is a bit better in this regard but it's still pretty ugly. That ugliness extends to the world too. By the end of dishonored 2 I completely disabled all voices just to stop the guard banter. I'm sorry but when I'm sneaking around I don't want to hear guards complaining about their STDs and other gross rubbish. Like, come on game, the purpose of guard barks is to help the player identify and track the guards, it's a purely functional thing that we're going to hear a BILLION TIMES. As such, those barks should be easy to hear many many many times, and be vague enough to not imply character when the guards don't have any. This game fails on all of those counts. I hated the guard banter in both games, and dishonored 2 made it WORSE. Ugh! Also the worlds are just, needlessly dirty. Like, come on, a rich person's house should look prestine to contrast the ugly plague infested streets, yet it has trash and rats just like everywhere else in the game. Aaaanyway, what little music was present in the games was forgettable AF, the story in both games was kind of predictable and boring (Dishonored 2), or somehow nonsensical AND predictable and boring (Dishonored 1). Seriously Dishonored 1 has so SO many plot holes. ...ok I'll stop ranting now. The gameplay of these games was quite good, but everything else about them just made me hate playing them. After dishonored 1 I was hoping the lauded Dishonored 2 would fix these issues, but it didn't, and made many of them worse. The final conclusion I got from playing these games was that I kind of don't want to play anything from this developer ever again.
Star Wars Squadrons - So, we have an Index. It's what sonicadvance plays Beat Saber VR games on. Personally though, VR has not grabbed me like, at all. Maybe it's because I was really immersed in the Wii generation, and still am really, look at where I'm writing this! But to me, VR is just Wii Motion Plus with stereoscopy. To be clear, both of those things are great, I really loved the Wii and my 3DS (I even bought a New 3DS XL for better stereoscopy!), and I used their abilities to the fullest. But it's not new to me. It's unremarkable, except for my own unique blend of VR sickness that I'd have to push past to use it. I don't get nausea from motion sickness, thank goodness, but I do get some vertigo-like dizziness during rotation while in VR. Mostly though, due to um, history, I can't stand not being aware of my environment. Having my vision blocked by a screen gives me a lot of anxiety, so I take the headset off endlessly to check my surroundings. Anyway, this is improvable, but I'd need a really good game to give me a reason to get my VR legs, and so far, that game just hasn't existed. I've played a lot of Wii games, and frankly, most VR games are just awkward attempts at Wii Sports minigames. And shooting, there are many many many VR shooty games. Yay shooting with motion controls, amazing, no one ever does that *looks at steam controller* Anyway, Half Life Alex could have been that game that got me to bother, but, then I heard it cranks the creep factor up, and well, I'm atrociously bad with horror and Half Life already kind of skirts too far into horror for my liking, so having that but worse in VR? Nope! But then came Squadrons, a game I played a little of out of VR and was like, this is a good game, maybe I should play it in VR? And it's really neat! Being able to look around while flying is very cool. It does little for the gameplay and is entirely extra, sure, but it's a game I enjoy and in a novel form, I'm cool with this. I'm not so cool with the massive technical issues of squadrons in VR though. Most of them are patched by now though, so I have meant to pick the game back up and try again for a few months now. We'll see, I guess. I may just play it on my television, and get HDR, better graphics, higher resolution, stability, not needing to adapt to a silly headset... Yea I'm definitely thinking about dropping this VR experiment. But we have the Index and it's the ONLY game I have ever wanted to play in VR even a little bit so... We'll see. Oh, I should talk about the game. It's good! Having played the entire X-wing series it's definitely simplified, but most of the meat is still there, and it looks great and flies well. I haven't gotten far in the campaign before moving to VR then abandoning it due to tech problems, but so far I've enjoyed what I've played.
Pheonotopia Awakening - Let's end on a high note! This game is GREAT! I saw a streamer playing it and just had to get into it. It's a Metroidvania-ARPGish thing with a cute retro art style and fabulous pixel animation. If you google pics of it don't let the art fool you into thinking it's basic and stuff - Pheontopia Awakening animates beautifully. In addition to the art, it has great combat with neat mechanics and genuine challenge, great and seriously fiendish puzzles, great music, tons and tons of collectables, and fantastic writing, story, sense of humor, and environment. I adore this game! I've put like 50 hours into it and I'm just going to totally complete this game. I love it.
EDIT: I forgot Hitman 2016! These game is hella fun. It's a stealth puzzle game. Like, it involves "action" kind of, it has guns and technically you can shoot random people if you want to fail, but it isn't an action game in the slightest. It's a puzzle game. Guns are a tool for solving the puzzle, but so is a glass of water on the counter, or a chandelier, or a just a ledge that someone wanders too close to. Each mission is a puzzle with near infinite solutions, and everything in the game is about not only solving the puzzle, but solving it as quickly, stealthily, and/or flashy as you can. And it's SO FUN. I spent over 100 hours into Hitman 2016 and didn't even complete all of the content. And I also have Hitman 2 to go through! And Hitman 3 later when it comes out on steam! I am looking forward to spending 200+ more hours in this franchise in the near future. It's a hella good game!
Ara Fell Enhanced Edition - This was a blind steam grab, but I really enjoyed it! It's a JRPG, but with some very interesting mechanic changes. Strangely enough, its combat system is only lightly modified versus typical JRPG. Usually that's where the innovation is, ala bravely default. Ara Fell EE instead changes looting, moving to a crafting system for equipment and items. I often do not enjoy crafting systems as they can get quite grindy but, this one avoids that trap very well. It's very low grind and used more for gating than anything else, plus it makes getting potions and other typical useables a lot easier. It's really neat. That being said, it isn't without mechanical changes. It has an ultimate move that builds between fights, very good class system and upgrade pathinig, and the very interesting twist of instant restoration after every fight so you always start fresh. It sounds like not much on paper, but combined, it adds up to a familiar yet unique combat experience that I definitely enjoyed. Anyway, in addition to mechanics, Ara Fell has a good story and some good writing behind it too! Definitely can recommend this one! Also, it has an option to double the speed of battle animations and just, yea, I just left it on. Super nice. Oh, also, I played it on Hard, and was pretty happy with it. A couple of times things got a little tight, but not super difficult otherwise. Pretty satisfying imo.
Freedom Planet - It's like classic sonic but better, but I don't really care for classic sonic, so... It's fine. Hey, I beat it with one character, which is farther than I've ever gotten in a classic sonic game!
Ace Combat 7 - My first Ace Combat game. I was quite let down. It's combat and flight are fine, though I found it suuuper easy, and the music was pretty alright if a bit generic. But the story, oh gods. "Let's introduce an interesting story and character and focus on them in this cutscene. .... and now we swap to an entirely different story staring the player character, boring mcgeneric, who's flying a plane I guess" *sigh* It had a few little interesting ideas, like the scrap queen and arsenal bird, but it never went anywhere with them. Also did I mention it was stupid easy? Maybe I've just played too much star fox and rogue squadron but it was SO easy. I got bored and didn't finish the game.
Falconeer - A breath of fresh air after Ace Combat! Great flying mechanics, neat story that I wasn't able to guess completely, and good fighting that was genuinely hard at points. All on top of its super neat zero-textures aesthetic that's just super cool! And seriously, the dev started the game to try to make a game with zero textures, and accomplished it. The entirely game is all polygons and shaders, and that's it. It gives it an entirely unique look that you won't find anywhere else. It's really inventive and looks great. It isn't perfect, like, I ran into a bit of a difficulty wall about 1/3rd of the way through the game. But after grinding a bit (and realizing the generous quit window to restart a mission without losing money, games should just stop monetary death punishment as redoing content is enough punishment as it is /rant), investing in weapons and birds, I got through it and breezed through the rest of the game. Still, it's short, and quite fun.
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - What the actual @*!?^! This game is aesthetic AF, but the game portion of it is... awkward, hella confusing, and just... not fun. Played it for about an hour then dropped it. I very much do not recommend this one.
Battle of Polytopia - A surprising one for me. It's like a tiny 4X game, designed around mobiles but with a good steam port. But I've actually played it the most on my ipad of all things. I don't really play games on my phone or ipad so I find this fact amusing. But yea, what I said is exactly what it is. It's a bite sized 4X game, and it just works. I don't play it often or that much but I've picked it up every now and then for the past couple of months and have definitely liked it a lot. Especially the DLC Elf race. They take a long time to get going but once they do, they steamroll.
Dishonored 1 and 2 - These games are close to being really good, but just don't make it. First, the good points. Sneaking is great, and combining it with powers is hella fun. Like, once I got good at the teleportation quirks of each game, I could zip in and take our guards and zip out like crazy fast and it's soooo satisfying! The gameplay is really the shining spot for these games. But everything else... First of all, they are just... they are gross. They are just gross. The aethetic is bad imo, with awkwardly large hands and feet and grossly amplified textures. They just look bad. Dishonored 2 is a bit better in this regard but it's still pretty ugly. That ugliness extends to the world too. By the end of dishonored 2 I completely disabled all voices just to stop the guard banter. I'm sorry but when I'm sneaking around I don't want to hear guards complaining about their STDs and other gross rubbish. Like, come on game, the purpose of guard barks is to help the player identify and track the guards, it's a purely functional thing that we're going to hear a BILLION TIMES. As such, those barks should be easy to hear many many many times, and be vague enough to not imply character when the guards don't have any. This game fails on all of those counts. I hated the guard banter in both games, and dishonored 2 made it WORSE. Ugh! Also the worlds are just, needlessly dirty. Like, come on, a rich person's house should look prestine to contrast the ugly plague infested streets, yet it has trash and rats just like everywhere else in the game. Aaaanyway, what little music was present in the games was forgettable AF, the story in both games was kind of predictable and boring (Dishonored 2), or somehow nonsensical AND predictable and boring (Dishonored 1). Seriously Dishonored 1 has so SO many plot holes. ...ok I'll stop ranting now. The gameplay of these games was quite good, but everything else about them just made me hate playing them. After dishonored 1 I was hoping the lauded Dishonored 2 would fix these issues, but it didn't, and made many of them worse. The final conclusion I got from playing these games was that I kind of don't want to play anything from this developer ever again.
Star Wars Squadrons - So, we have an Index. It's what sonicadvance plays Beat Saber VR games on. Personally though, VR has not grabbed me like, at all. Maybe it's because I was really immersed in the Wii generation, and still am really, look at where I'm writing this! But to me, VR is just Wii Motion Plus with stereoscopy. To be clear, both of those things are great, I really loved the Wii and my 3DS (I even bought a New 3DS XL for better stereoscopy!), and I used their abilities to the fullest. But it's not new to me. It's unremarkable, except for my own unique blend of VR sickness that I'd have to push past to use it. I don't get nausea from motion sickness, thank goodness, but I do get some vertigo-like dizziness during rotation while in VR. Mostly though, due to um, history, I can't stand not being aware of my environment. Having my vision blocked by a screen gives me a lot of anxiety, so I take the headset off endlessly to check my surroundings. Anyway, this is improvable, but I'd need a really good game to give me a reason to get my VR legs, and so far, that game just hasn't existed. I've played a lot of Wii games, and frankly, most VR games are just awkward attempts at Wii Sports minigames. And shooting, there are many many many VR shooty games. Yay shooting with motion controls, amazing, no one ever does that *looks at steam controller* Anyway, Half Life Alex could have been that game that got me to bother, but, then I heard it cranks the creep factor up, and well, I'm atrociously bad with horror and Half Life already kind of skirts too far into horror for my liking, so having that but worse in VR? Nope! But then came Squadrons, a game I played a little of out of VR and was like, this is a good game, maybe I should play it in VR? And it's really neat! Being able to look around while flying is very cool. It does little for the gameplay and is entirely extra, sure, but it's a game I enjoy and in a novel form, I'm cool with this. I'm not so cool with the massive technical issues of squadrons in VR though. Most of them are patched by now though, so I have meant to pick the game back up and try again for a few months now. We'll see, I guess. I may just play it on my television, and get HDR, better graphics, higher resolution, stability, not needing to adapt to a silly headset... Yea I'm definitely thinking about dropping this VR experiment. But we have the Index and it's the ONLY game I have ever wanted to play in VR even a little bit so... We'll see. Oh, I should talk about the game. It's good! Having played the entire X-wing series it's definitely simplified, but most of the meat is still there, and it looks great and flies well. I haven't gotten far in the campaign before moving to VR then abandoning it due to tech problems, but so far I've enjoyed what I've played.
Spoiler:
EDIT: I forgot Hitman 2016! These game is hella fun. It's a stealth puzzle game. Like, it involves "action" kind of, it has guns and technically you can shoot random people if you want to fail, but it isn't an action game in the slightest. It's a puzzle game. Guns are a tool for solving the puzzle, but so is a glass of water on the counter, or a chandelier, or a just a ledge that someone wanders too close to. Each mission is a puzzle with near infinite solutions, and everything in the game is about not only solving the puzzle, but solving it as quickly, stealthily, and/or flashy as you can. And it's SO FUN. I spent over 100 hours into Hitman 2016 and didn't even complete all of the content. And I also have Hitman 2 to go through! And Hitman 3 later when it comes out on steam! I am looking forward to spending 200+ more hours in this franchise in the near future. It's a hella good game!
AMD Threadripper Pro 5975WX PBO+200 | Asrock WRX80 Creator | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE | 64GB DDR4-3600 Octo-Channel | Windows 11 23H1 | (details)
MacBook Pro 14in | M1 Max (32 GPU Cores) | 64GB LPDDR5 6400 | macOS 12