Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?

Never seen this thread before, but I'm playing Factorio right now. On next week's thread, I will be playing Factorio as well. Same thing the week after. At this point it's not really my choice to make anymore...

PEAK with friends, otherwise, grinding through Marvel Rivals ranked, and keeping up with Nikke. I was also getting through FF16, but put that down for a little.

Got 3 games I rotate now of which only 1 I haven’t played before.

Death Stranding: Finished it on the PS4 way back when and bought the PC director's cut a long time ago but only recently picked it up again.

Cyberpunk 2077: Technically bought it day 1 but I am just now doing my first modded playthru.

Starfield: I am not a Bethesda fan so I was 0% hyped for this and only watched a lot of YouTube content about it. Randomly decided to pull the trigger recently tho. Completed the game vanilla first now I am doing a modded playthru and taking my time with it.
This one surprised me the most because I’m having fun and really enjoy my time with it. Funny thing is that most of the negative stuff mentioned about this game absolutely holds true, the game kinda ass. And Nasapunk is an oxymoron. But I’m a raccoon I enjoy trash. And if u shove 600 mods down Todd’s throat you actually get a really cool experience out of it.
Still wouldn’t recommend it tho.

I have somewhat similar thoughts on Starfield. I actually quite enjoyed my first playthrough of the game and wouldn’t mind playing it again, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it to someone. I thought the ship building was pretty good, and was probably my favourite part of the game, and playing through the main quest and major side quests were fun too, but beyond the clearly written out stuff there’s a lot of nothing. It’s the kind of game I’d have several shorter playthroughs of, spread out across a considerable period of time, rather than one or two really long ones or many back to back. I’m glad I played the game, and I’m glad I have it available to play again, but it’s certainly not a perfect game by a long shot and deserves its criticism. The criticism just doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers other people.

Im playing gta 3 on ps2. Nice nostalgia trip but the story telling is kinda dated especislly since gta 4 was my first real playtheough of a gta game back in the days and that has great story telling (and the protagonist even talks!!!!)

This week end an old buddy of mine is visiting and we will probably be picking up some old gc and ps2 titles.

Also had some more fun on my wow private server.

If you get a chance, you should definitely check out Kinetica for the PS2 if you can get your hands on it, a great racing game and perfect for couch co-op!
- Thanks for the tip!

Just started Gran Turismo 4 carreer got my b licence but man i suck hard in this game

I'm playing Disco Elysium on android and I gotta say I'm loving it. I couldn't really get into it on PC but I'm enjoying everything about it here.

I need to take another look at that game. I loved the narrative design, and I thought the world was interesting, but I got stuck and lost and didn't know how to get past the bouncer dude.

Farcry Primal. Saw it was on sale recently, so I decided to snag it. It's not bad so far and a fun setting to mess around in. Works with my linux setup and steam deck.

How high can you go in the settings while still getting 55-60 fps at native res on the Deck?
- I run it at normal (medium) quality and generally get a consistent 60 fps. Anything above that and it starts to dip into the 40s.

I've been playing Conan Exiles, a survival crafting game that's been out for several years but still receives regular major updates.

It's a bit generic - there's little I haven't already seen in another survival game - but it's more polished than most due to having a major developer behind it. There's a lot of content, bespoke animations for nearly every weapon, and the base building is a delight. Exploration is also great due to diverse biomes and the game's climbing system, which also lets you grab the wall while falling and slowly slide to a halt - this looks and feels great and turns avoiding falling damage from a headache into a cinematic moment. It's not parkour, but it tugs the same strings.

The game has an unfortunate tendency to crash when messing with companion inventories, though that may be due to a Steam Workshop mod I'm using (one I can't bring myself to remove because it makes inventory and companion management so much easier). Aside from that hiccup - which only triggers once every few hours, which is tolerable for me - and knocked out enemies occasionally falling through the ground (you need to drag them back to your base to recruit them as NPCs), the game has been rock-solid.

I'm somewhat tempted to buy the new Dune game by the same devs, but I've heard mixed things about the solo experience.

I second this as a sandbox builder game. Self hosted a server and played with my wife for a few months. I feel like I barely scratched the full content of the game. Base building and taming/companions really is a delight. Especially building a full fortress with all the "staff" for the crafting stations.

I just scooped up Killzone Shadow Fall and I'm enjoying it, even though the beginning part of the game was basically a half hour long movie disguised as a tutorial. I also got the Shadow of the Colossus remaster for PS4 so that's next.

For quick sessions, I've gone back and started half heartedly trying to 1CC Danmaku Unlimited 2 since the new trailer for 4 just came out.

Mam, I really should have got into the Killzone franchise when I was younger. Always grew up with playstations, but never bought any of those games, how's Shadow Fall been so far?
- It's been generally fun but I am really bad at this kind of game so I end up lagging too far behind where the story wants me to be, so enemies teleport seemingly out of nowhere. I also can't seem to identify where the alarms are, which makes it even worse. That's a me problem, though.
  If you like story driven FPS games with good art, it'll probably scratch the itch for you. It's not as much as an interactive movie as the games from the era of quicktime events but there is a little bit of linear play to it. Overall it's pretty standard fare. I read a review that was something like "It's not a great FPS game but it's a great Killzone game" and I think that tracks.

This week Blasphemous (the past week I played (and finished) Resident Evil 4 Remake)

Is it your first time playing Blasphemous? How are you liking it? I just finished it and have.... mixed feelings about it.
- Yes. It’s my first time playing it. At the moment I like it. It recalls me the feelings of Salt and Sanctuary that I love it.
  But it has some things that could be improved and the level of difficulty of some areas are too high. I would appreciate more checkpoints to solve this.
  Also I have at the moment some confussion on how the things work. For example, I recently got my third “potion” and I have no idea how I did. I also guess that I can improve my character like if I level up it, but apparently you dont have levels or I dont know how to do it.
  Also I had to search in google how to close the game in the PC version.

I'm working through Act 3 (Lawful route) of Tactics Ogre Reborn. It was getting a bit challenging, until I tried crafting to get +1 weapons and armor.

Assassin‘s Creed Unity

I‘ve complained it the past about Shadow of War that I felt like I had to fight Talon to get him to go where I want him to. Now that I’m close to 100%ing ACU, I want to apologize to Talon cause ACU has the most sluggish, slow, and imprecise movement I‘ve ever wrestled with in these kinda games. Really made me realize how good I had it in Shadow of War lol. Every enemy just screaming at me on sight for no reason and tryna pick a fight with me when there‘s 50 people around me is also getting annoying. I think I love these games mainly for their sight-seeing and podcast side-activity capabilities now (collecathon). And revolutionary Paris is definitely a good sight-seeing location.

DiRT Rally 2.0

I‘m more of an arcade racer fan, but I‘m trying to challenge myself a bit with this one. I sometimes don‘t understand why I‘m spinning out, but I‘m hanging in there. The goal is another 100%, we‘ll see how far I can go! It‘s a pretty good rally simulation game, for anyone who doesn‘t know. It‘s also dirt cheap (hah).

Octopath Traveler

Hardly playing it atm but man, the theme song speaks to me, what a good piece. I‘m done with all chapter 1s, currently following a guide to pick up the missables before I go into the next chapters. There‘s something cozy about voiced pixel graphics JRPG storytelling to me. To anyone who‘s never heard of this game: Imagine old Final Fantasy titles, still pixel graphics, still turn-based, but with a few modern twists and the graphics pop out like a children picture book with modern effects. Full 60 at native res at max graphics on the Deck.

Tetris Party for the Wii

Blast Off for the PSP

Both emulated on a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. Just been getting into emulation properly over the past few months and I've been loving playing retro games.

Dome Keeper

Straftat

I remember I watched ChristopherOdd play Dome Keeper for months, that game is so satisfying and chill.
- For sure, but can be also quite challenging. :)

Finally completed the hitman 3 main story! Time to get to the story missions and achievements

Nice! What did you think? I’ve played the trilogy more times than I can count at this point. The side missions are probably my favourite from them though actually. In particular the Seven Deadly Sins and especially Patient Zero are the pinnacle of the series imo.
- I really enjoy the soundtrack and how polished the game has become. My initiation to the series was Absolution and I think the game made big steps with each release since then. My favourite locations are still from Hitman 1, maybe because I played them the most, since I always started at 1 when I played 2 and now 3. Nothing beats the endless options and emerging stories of Sapienza for me

Pikmin 2

I've mostly played on the Switch this past 2 weeks as my kids have taken over everything else...

Also a bit of Outrun, Circuit Superstars and Absolute Drift.

Pikmin 2
How do you feel about removing the time limit?

Just started Dread Delusion and Monster Sanctuary. Both are real good so far!

EVO The Search For Eden

OK, seeing the fighting game community is experiencing some kind of tag fighters resurregence right now, I decided to give them a fair shake.

I had not before because they seemed too much work. Like, picking and learning 1 character is so difficult that I felt exhausted just at the thought of picking and learning 3. I also always thought the team composition aspect of it adds a premeditated layer of strategy that I could do without.

All that said, I still felt I was missing out, so I picked up Dragon Ball FighterZ and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 this week.

Now, I faintly remember watching parts of some DBZ episodes when I was younger, and just loathed it. I did have a weird and not necessarily good taste as a child though, so I'm not sure if I'd hate it as much now. That said, I still do not feel desire to check out the show, TBH. I feel it doesn't have a lot I'd be interested in after playing the game.

Before getting to the gameplay, and even though I bought it on a deep sale, I'd like to bring up that buying it was not a pleasant experience. Bandai successfully bamboozled me into buying the base game and the first season pass separately, which costs $2 more than the FighterZ Edition, which includes both. TBF, I could not have foreseen my desire to buy the season pass because I don't know much about the roster and couldn't have foretold I will like and want to designate Android 17 as the point in my team.

I'm willing to admit the fault is mine as much as it is Bandai's, but I still feel bitter about the $2 😅

Gameplay is surprisingly super fun, although I'm yet to figure out how to effectively do tag combos, chain supers, or any of the super fun shit I picked up the game to ultimately experience. Learning BnBs and getting familiar with the game mechanics has been fun so far. It helps a lot it's an Arc System Works game and I'm familiar with their combo systems and whatnot.

I still haven't fucked around enough with Marvel to talk about how I feel, but I can say I bought it on a deep discount too, did not run into any issue buying it because it's the Ultimate edition, so no DLC bullshit, and I'm excited to learn Viewtiful Joe and Amaterasu.

Even though it's revered, a reason to hesitate before buying UMVC3 was it still has delay netcode to this day, which more or less means it's unplayable online. I hope this changes at some point, but just the act of buying it now represents the first instance of my breaking the "no rollback = no buy" rule… I don't feel good about that, but the way I try and cope is justify it with: (1) it's a super deep discount—less than $5—and (2) it's Mahvel… way I understand it it's the quintessential tag fighter… avoiding it would feel like avoiding Kurosawa while exploring Japanese cinema.

Old ratchet & clank on RPCS3 are a freaking blast.

Love emulating games! I need to remake my library on my new PC.

Hearts of Iron IV with the Millenium Dawn mod as a newbie.

I'm playing on recruit difficulty, cause the AI would have gotten a bunch of bonuses whereas I would have been left with 0 advantages. I'm playing as Hungary with the goal of going through the historical route till 2010, cause the hungarian focus tree seems to prefer that, and I'm in the process of puppeting Slovenia by inflience alone and attacking Slovakia way later.

We love irredentism. I'm not an actual irredentist nutjob, but grand strategy games bring out the most unhinged version of ourselves.

Extra long post today, so I'm experimenting with spoiler tags to not take up too much space. Let me know if it's a good idea.

After that I was in a mood for something different, and after realising how easy setting up Xemu was I went headfirst into Ninja Gaiden Black. I played Ninja Gaiden (2004) on the original Xbox as a kid back in the day, but I never finished it and always wanted to go back. With Ninja Gaiden 2 Black being released recently-ish and Ninja Gaiden 4 on the horizon this felt like the perfect time to play the definitive version of the best game in the series.

Now, I don't know whether I'll be able to finish it. I'm playing on "Normal" and not "Ninja Dog" (the easy mode). I'm 8 chapters in now and so far so good, but I'm well aware of the game's reputation as being prohibitively difficult. And I never did beat it back when I still had teenage reflexes.

That being said, I'm loving the ever-loving shit out of every moment so far. There is nothing like Ninja Gaiden combat out there, the relentless nature of every single encounter with extremely aggressive enemies constantly forcing you to push yourself to the limit and use every tool and trick at your disposal is satisfying like nothing else. It's extremely fast, but at the same time measured, deliberate and precise. You can't get away with button mashing, you have to consciously use actual combos and you have to use the right techniques and right weapons at the right times. The essence mechanic is also unique and offers constant mid-battle decisions.

The story is... it's there I guess. It's pretty terrible, truth be told. And the voice acting is hilariously bad early 2000s style. But let's face it, nobody plays NG for the story. At least the environments are cool and well designed, as are most of the monsters and characters (let's not talk about Rachel). The futuristic mashup with traditional Japanese ninjas and samurai is a very cool setting.

The graphics also need to be shouted out. Sure, I turned up the rendering resolution by 6x in Xemu, but still. Barring some low-res ground textures and the like the game looks phenomenal for a 2005 console release. What Team Ninja were able to extract out of the scuffed ass original Xbox hardware is just black magic. Character models still look great and the animations are fantastic.

Definitely recommend checking it out if you like character action games. NGB is considered by many to be the peak of that genre and it's easy to see why.

Personally I’m a huge fan of both Limbo and Inside, solely because of the atmosphere. I much prefer Inside but I also really enjoyed Limbo too. I hope you enjoy Inside more than Limbo, but your complaints about Limbo will be more or less the same in Inside.
- If either the puzzles are better or there is more of a story to it I can see myself liking INSIDE more. Most people seem to prefer it, after all.
  Any puzzle platformer will face an uphill battle with me though as it's just not a genre I enjoy. Sometimes - like GRIS - they come through, but often not. I also really liked The Unfinished Swan, if that counts as a puzzle platformer.
  LIMBO had a couple of good puzzles (the antigrav one with the boxes near the end comes to mind) but also a huge amount of either forgettable ones or frustrating and/or outright bad ones. A few too many relied on trial-and-error instead of observation and deduction, which I don't find fun or interesting.
Why did you stick with Blasphemous 😂 I remember you hated it a couple of weeks ago.
INSIDE is better than LIMBO, IMO—in terms of production and sound design, at the very least. Without revealing too much, some sections are more fun. Although the core gameplay is not much different, unfortunately.
My opinion on LIMBO and INSIDE hasn't changed since playing them: they're worth $2-3 each, not more.
Xemu is super easy to set up, yeah. I hope you enjoy the rest of your NGB playthrough, and you can definitely beat it, yes!
Word of warning about Ninja Gaiden 2 Black: it's more or less Sigma 2 reskinned, unfortunately. They called it "Black" for marketing, but it's not really the definitive version. You can pick it up and install the White mod, which brings it closer to OG NGII, but if you already have Xemu set up, might as well just play OG NGII—it's an incredible experience, but also get ready to experience a ton of NES bullshit moments in 3D 😂 It's downright hilarious how OG NGII just doesn't give a flying fuck about balance, but it's definitely part of the charm.
On Ninja Gaiden 4, it's a collab between Team Ninja and Platinum Games, which's exciting, but I'd say maybe adjust your expectations for a slightly different experience than the typical Ninja Gaiden.
- Why did you stick with Blasphemous 😂 I remember you hated it a couple of weeks ago.
  I bought it and so I wanted to finish it, especially since it's not all that long. And I don't like leaving things unfinished 😂 And I did really like the art, story and world building.
  INSIDE is better than LIMBO, IMO—in terms of production and sound design, at the very least. Without revealing too much, some sections are more fun. Although the core gameplay is not much different, unfortunately.
  That makes me feel so-so about it, especially having spent I think around $9 on it (last chance before it getting delisted). I heard there is somewhat more of a story in it? That was one thing holding LIMBO back for me.
  Word of warning about Ninja Gaiden 2 Black: it's more or less Sigma 2 reskinned, unfortunately. They called it "Black" for marketing, but it's not really the definitive version. You can pick it up and install the White mod, which brings it closer to OG NGII, but if you already have Xemu set up, might as well just play OG NGII—it's an incredible experience, but also get ready to experience a ton of NES bullshit moments in 3D 😂 It's downright hilarious how OG NGII just doesn't give a flying fuck about balance, but it's definitely part of the charm.
  Yeah I've heard. Ninja Gaiden series really is a clusterfuck of multiple versions of each release that both add and subtract things. Original NG2 was on 360 unfortunately, and is trapped on that ecosystem. It apparently runs okay on Xenia Canary but I haven't looked into it yet. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I'm currently thinking playing both NG2 and NG2 Black (those visuals look so good). But... that's all contingent on me beating NGB first! I'll definitely look into that mod, there is also the Ninja Gaiden Sigma Black mod, but I don't know how much they've been able to restore considering the huge differences between Black and Sigma.

I might be a bit obsessed with Project Wingman at the moment.

Project wingman is rather incredible.
- It really is. I could really use more surprises like this.

soul reaver remastered

Earth 2150

Oof, I remember that one. It's so cool to build all these awesome units. And at the end you don't have enough resources and would have to start from the beginning.

Almost done with the mission mode on Mario Kart DS. Gonna start a playthrough of Shadow the Hedgehog next.