I gave FFXIII 3 shots, putting in over 40h in total. The farthest I got was about halfway through, two years ago. I hated the game so much, that I actually stopped playing games altogether for like three months. It was completely miserable. I’m a certified FFXIII hater.

That D4 Halloween event was such a disappointment for me. I did like two Nightmare Dungeons (didn’t even spawn the Butcher), collected the free items, and was done.

Finished HROT. It’s a good game, like I said last week, it’s basically Quake. I started on the Hard difficulty, played through the first episode, but turned it down for the others, because I wanted more run-and-gun and not creeping around corners, because enemies kill me in two shots.

Then I also played through Animal Well. A great looking metroidvania, where you don’t fight, it’s more about avoiding enemies or scaring them away. I saw credits after less than six hours, but then spend another eight searching for secrets. I needed help from a guide for the last couple, to get to the credits the second time, for the second ending. There’s some more stuff to find, maybe a third or true ending, but I don’t really care enough to do that.

I also decided to check out Rain World, but I’m not really sure about this one. For some reason, the game resolution is 768p, which scales with nothing. This means, unless you play on a cheap or old laptop, that uses that resolution, the game will be blurry (or a tiny window). There isn’t even a x2 scaling option or something. Luckily there is a mod fixes this, but it’s still baffling, that this is even needed. Like Animal Well, it’s also a game, where fighting isn’t really the focus (although you can to some extent), but most of the time I was fighting the controls. I’ll give it a bit more time next week, but unless it suddenly clicks with me, I’ll skip this one.

Since I’m in the mood for some metroidvanias right now, I played through another one, Haiku, the Robot. It’s a pretty cookie cutter medroidvania, not bad, but also doesn’t do anything special. You find abilities, like a double jump, short teleport, morphball, stuff like that. There’s also a system like the Charms in Hollow Knight to enhance certain parts of your skill set. I usually like pixel art graphics, but I really didn’t vibe with the enemy design, and everything else is once again pretty basic.

Earlier in the week I started Remnant II with a friend, but the beginning was really rough, so much so, that I don’t know if we’ll continue. The levels and bosses are randomized to some extent, so depending on your luck you might get easier or harder bosses. Our first boss (or event) was pretty terrible. We had to run down a tower, while we were chased by lighting (but also couldn’t be too fast, because of more lightning), and had to shoot some stuff in the middle of the tower, all while enemies spawned. The worst part about this “boss” was that basically everything, except the enemies, was a one-shot death. I was terrible at this and constantly failed, but we eventually made it through. The next couple of bosses were better, but not by much. Who knows if we’ll ever get back to this one.

Then the same friend and me started a coop Baldurs Gate 3 run today. I guess we’re doing an evil run, since he picked Dark Urge and we’re going to raid the grove next time. I played through the game once, around the time of the 1.0 release, and wanted to do an evil playthrough anyway eventually, so this is fine with me.

You probably know this already, but if you don’t get slowed down that much on T3, definitely move up, but if you’re just getting killed too much or don’t kill stuff fast enough, stay on T2. I farmed T3 for a while, even though I had unlocked T4, because I would just get one-shot too much. After some more upgrades and a Mythic Unique, I was finally able to do T4 efficiently.

since for whatever reason ancestral items don’t drop that often for me, and the last thing I have to do is salvage 100 of them. It might have to do with the Torment level I’m on

I’m on Torment 4 and yeah, they don’t drop a lot. If you’re on a high enough difficulty, Ancestral Uniques probably drop more, since you can farm the Uber bosses, who basically only drop uniques. I think that objective was the second to last one I finished for the journey (the last are the 5 Helltide Commanders, which I don’t probably won’t do).

I thought I was done with the latest Diablo 4 season last week, but then I put in a bunch more hours this weekend. While the season and the expansion is generally fun, it feels like the devs took two steps forward and one step back. Progression seems a lot more tedious, compared to before. In earlier seasons, you could basically unlock the highest difficulty really fast and progress pretty quickly to the endgame content. Now, with everything a lot harder and a bunch more difficulty options, you take twice or three times as long, to get to the same point as before. If I didn’t play the Spiritborn, who is completely busted this season, it might’ve taken even longer. I still gotta try the raid, which you can only do coop, although I rarely play with someone else.

Then I started HROT, but have only finished the first level, so I can’t talk about it too much. It seems like it’s basically just Quake with a different skin, I guess? I love the look, and it plays pretty smoothly, so I look forward to playing more of it.

More Diablo 4, after finally getting over my cold. Playing through the campaign was super boring (being sick and miserable didn’t help). All that time is also basically wasted, and you just want it to be over as fast as possible, to actually start progressing your character. Future seasons might be better, since you can skip the campaign, but a bunch of stuff only unlocks after you hit max level anyway, so who knows. The expansion increased the difficulty of the game, added some more difficulty options and did a stat squish, but I don’t think I’m a big fan. Until yesterday, it felt like I was just treading water, not making much progress. Then I managed to unlock Torment 3 difficulty, change my build a bit and get good enough gear, started blasting through enemies, and had more fun. So, while I’m not bored out of my skull anymore, I think I’ll just finish the season journey and battle pass, and then take another break from the game.

I have no interest in playing this game myself, but I’ve been watching a streamer go thorugh the story mode. The combat is whatever, probably good enough if you like this type of game. The story between all the fights is told absolutely horribly though. Lots of stuff just gets skipped over or mentioned in a single picture. Like suddenly Goku is Super Saiyan God, with no explanation or a character is dead.

~250 games testet, about 90% worked without issue.

Some games were hard coded to avoid Intel graphics and would use the AMD iGPU by default (even a newer title like Alan Wake 2 did this), but after disabling the iGPU, most of those were fine.

I think like 10-15 games didn’t work at all or had basically unplayable performance, maybe a few more with graphical glitches, some minor, some more noticeable.

Board game the Chinese players the option to download their account data before shutting down the servers. Whoever did that will (presumably) have the option to upload that data once the services are restored.

Extremely unlikely, Blizzard probably don’t want a bunch of files that have been tempered with. Also, if it’s like the data export you can also do for non-Chinese accounts, it’s just stuff like transaction history, chats, and essentially your profile in a game like Overwatch (match history, stats, etc.).

Afaik neither blizzard or netease saved any of the data. Blizzard didn’t because Chinese players’ data can’t be stored on servers outside of china and netease didn’t because…fuck 'em?

I’ve read the exact opposite. When the servers went down Netease (or Blizzard) announced the accounts would stay and be saved.

I’ve only heard good things and watched a Streamer playing it last year, and I want to play it eventually myself.

While I generally like Souls-like games, I never got into most Fromsoft games, except Elden Ring, so we’ll see how it goes.

Maybe Lies of P or Star Ocean The Second Story R, plus one or two “Survivors-like” (Halls of Torment, Death Must Die).

So they have some studios in Russia and Belarus, how does that make them Russian? They also have to studios in Denmark and Sweden, I guess that makes them Scandinavian.

This sounds terrible. I wonder how many more games aren’t going to be available in Germany, because nobody is going to go back to fill out this questionnaire for some old game.

It also stinks that the first PC version will almost certainly end up being on Epic before steam.

Square is super inconsistent with this stuff, that it’s pretty hard to tell what’s going to be an Epic Exclusive and what’s not. I do hope there’s not going to be a second exclusivity period, before it’s coming to Steam though.

It was just a short reply about the top played games on Steam (by playtime), but of course it has to be expanded to a whole, useless article, along with a clickbait headline.

The Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).

Some of the worst villains ever, and you’re constantly getting blue balled. The series keeps introducing new characters, that don’t matter, and just drag things out for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

Zero and Azure are great though, until they connect back to the main story at the end.