Last Game You Played

[Dragon Lord]

Afterimage (PC)

Been slowly working my way through the game for a while now. Recently got back to playing it a little more steadily to complete it. 100%'d this game a couple of years ago on PS5. It's a really good Metroidvania and playing through it again has been as fun as it was the first time (hopefully the third play through on PS4 for the platinum will be just as fun, haha).

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (3DS)

Been years since I went through the game and since I've been on a Fire Emblem kick recently while playing the FE8 Reforged mod, I decided I wanted to play through this game again because it is one of my absolute favorite FE games. So far, so good. Still absolutely loving the game and having a blast playing through it and through the DLCs for the first time. Got some ridiculously bonkers units in this play through, like one of my Sages who has more Defense than my Armored Knights.

Octopath Traveler (PS4)

Progress has been slow and steady. I got the entire team together finally and now I gotta go around and start working on the second chapters for each character (this is where I stopped playing the PC version, so every thing from here on out is brand new).

[Moonface]

Slay the Spire 2 (PC)
Just the daily run in both single player and co-op, which were okay but it feels like the modifiers have been very similar for quite a few of the recent dailies and that the only thing that can make them feel interesting is what cards/relics you manage to find. I'm hoping tonight's daily offers something that incorporates some of the beta branch changes that went live last night.

Pathogenic (PC)
Tried the daily for this and I think I completely screwed myself by choosing to combine my weapons together that I started with. Combining weapons increases their damage/rarity, so I thought condensing 4 into 1 would make something really crazy and instead it felt like my damage output decreased. Unfortunately there's no way in the game codex to see what each tier of weapon does so I can't compare them to see if that was actually the case or if it just felt that way from enemies scaling faster than my damage did.
Also tried a normal run afterwards and barely made it to the Heart boss, and died pretty quickly as I expected. The run started good but I just couldn't get my damage output up in the later areas to kill stuff efficiently and not take a ton of damage. If not for how high my max health was I'd have probably died in the Liver.

Pokémon Pokopia (NS2)
Jumped back into this after 6+ months off it due to the DLC dropping, and forgot how much I enjoy this game. My only gripe with the first DLC is that it didn't add a way to destroy multiple blocks at once as Magnemite, and although the Lapras/Surf form can do it now it isn't very precise for my liking.

[Kyng]

Civilization VI

Still playing that Spain game, with those zombies. They're rather annoying... I have just about enough resources to fight them off - but they get stronger as the game goes on, so I have to upgrade my army frequently just to keep pace with them. And even then, I'm losing quite a lot of citizens to them (when they attack my cities, they zombify some of the population) - which is making it harder to actually build my empire up.

The other civs are suffering worse than I am, so I'm probably going to win - but it's probably going to be a Time Victory (from having the highest score when turns run out). I don't think I'm going to play another game with zombies after this one!

[Maniakkid25]

Advent Rising (PC)

Fuck me, is this game archaic. It doesn't have a reticule to aim with, instead auto-locking onto enemies a la Tomb Raider. Firing is done with the left and right mouse buttons: left mouse button for the left hand only, right for the right hand only. That didn't confuse me greatly when I was going through the tutorial and was like "why am I not shooting?" Movement is very loose, and you have a health pool rather than regenerating health (well, you do, but only past a certain limit) And yet, it's surprisingly advanced?! There are in-game choices that make story divergences, you can dual-wield rocket launchers (which is UNNECESSARY levels of awesome!), there's a dodge roll built in. This game has thrown me for a loop, and I've only been playing for an hour! Can't wait to see what comes next.

[Kyng]

The Sims 4

Still trying to 'finish' my current game (I'll consider it 'finished' when the last grandparent of my current child Sims has passed on). She's sticking around for rather a long time, but I'm not going to drown her in a pool or anything: I'm not *that* desperate to be rid of her .

Though she does have a Cowplant now, so she'll need to be a bit careful!

[Moonface]

Advent Rising (PC)

Fuck me, is this game archaic. It doesn't have a reticule to aim with, instead auto-locking onto enemies a la Tomb Raider. Firing is done with the left and right mouse buttons: left mouse button for the left hand only, right for the right hand only. That didn't confuse me greatly when I was going through the tutorial and was like "why am I not shooting?" Movement is very loose, and you have a health pool rather than regenerating health (well, you do, but only past a certain limit) And yet, it's surprisingly advanced?! There are in-game choices that make story divergences, you can dual-wield rocket launchers (which is UNNECESSARY levels of awesome!), there's a dodge roll built in. This game has thrown me for a loop, and I've only been playing for an hour! Can't wait to see what comes next.

The individual firing sounds like something that I'd expect to see for a game that has VR support, but I see this game is far too old for that.

Balatro (PC)
@ShiraNoMai asked me to try this game out near the end of last year and I forgot all about it until just now because a streamer I watch started playing it for the first time, so decided I'd give it a go myself too. It's fun so far, although I feel like I've barely seen anything having only got to 5/8 Ante on a normal difficulty Red deck.

[Kyng]

Civilization VI

Still trying to get past these bloody zombies. And I'm not going to lie: the game is feeling like a chore at this point. But I've come so far that I might as well stubbornly finish this off... at least everyone else is getting trashed even more than I am!

[Maniakkid25]

The individual firing sounds like something that I'd expect to see for a game that has VR support, but I see this game is far too old for that.

Yeah, nope. 2005, Bay-bee! Early days of third-person shooters, before the conventions had been codified! And yes, I do consider 2005 "early days"; even at their earliest possible definition, Third-person shooters as we recognize them would be less than 10 years old by Advent Rising's release. JRPGs were still arguing over whether to use Circle or X as their confirm button in Western releases by that point, and First-person shooters were just beginning to master twin-stick controls on console if you time it from Doom's release (which I think is fair, given the number of console ports it got)!

Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean (GCN)

No, I haven't given up on Advent Rising; I just had the urge to play it really bad, so I sated it. I do wish the remaster had the English VA, if only so I could easily show people how absolutely godawful this game's English VA is. Shame. Oh well.

[Dragon Lord]

Elden Ring (PC)

The Tarnished Edition content released, so I purchased it and started a new character to play around with the new classes. I went with the class that starts with the Light Greatsword, a weapon type I've yet to play around with because I haven't gotten around to playing SoTE yet (I did buy the DLC, but just haven't actually started it yet). So far it's been a pretty fun weapon type, it starts with Impaling Thrust which is actually a really good Ash of War to start with since it does pretty good poise damage and you can get lots of stuns on bosses with it. Then to make me even happier, they ended up putting a pair of Backhand Blades in the shop in the Roundtable Hold. These weapons are so fun, because they're made to be a Guard Counter weapon, though you have to play smartly with them because they don't have 100% physical guard, so you're still going to take a chunk of damage when guarding with them, but their Guard Counter is insane as it hits like 4-6 times and can end up stunning bosses insanely fast. If you build around them (multi-hit talismans, anything to boost guard counters, etc.), you can do absolutely massive damage per guard counter with them. I'm super happy that they added a way to get a pair of these early, instead of having to venture into the DLC to find them. Too bad I still have to go in there and actually play it if I want some of the other really fun DLC stuff, like Knight's Lightning Spear.

Octopath Traveler (PS4)

Holy difficulty spike, Batman. I was not expecting that. I finished all the Chapter 1 stories for all of the characters and then went and started Tressa's Chapter 2 and got to the boss of it and god damn. I thought I was fine in levels with having done everyone's first chapter and fighting every battle I've encountered the entire time in the game, but the boss beat me down and spit on my corpse. The boss was hitting each of my party members for like 800-1,000 damage and even the two henchmen were hitting for 600-800 (on attacks that hit the entire party, too). I think the highest HP any of my characters has is 1,700 currently, so being hit for over 50% of my health by all three enemies in the battle is not good. Once one party member went down, it was over. I couldn't revive them and keep the rest of my team healthy and eventually I just lost because the damage the enemies were outputting was far too much for my healing to keep up with. Especially since on some turns all three enemies went last, and then on the next turn two or all three of them would get the first attacks.

So yeah, was definitely not expecting that. Gonna have to take some time to do some heavy level grinding I guess. Probably should explore some of the optional areas around that were too high level for me at the time and try to find some more of the sub-jobs. Probably should at least take the time to find the other sub-jobs so I can have more options on my teams.

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (NS2)

Went back to continue playing through the game and my save files were all deleted for some reason, so had to restart. My Ike on my first play through there was a beast, and now my Ike is turning out to be a wet noodle. His strength refuses to get any points on level up, so he's taking much longer to kill things that he should be. It got so bad to the point where I actually restarted a chapter 5-6 times until he got good enough level ups to continue. Wasn't going to continue the game with a level 9 Ike with 7 Strength.

Mind Zero (PS Vita)

Me at the thought of continuing to drag myself through this horrendous 50-floor post game dungeon that's standing between me and finally getting the platinum for this game and being able to throw it in the trash.