Ok, after watching a bunch of peeps playing Slay the Spire on twitch, I finally picked it up.
It’s just taken about a day to beat the game with each of the 2 early access characters. It’s a fairly good take on the DreamQuest genre and I think I like it better than Monster Slayers.
How polished is it at this point? I know I’d like the game, but I generally can’t stand playing Early Access games knowing they’re going to change significantly before the final release.
Just picked up Cultist Simulator. For a very bare-bones game, in presentation, it works wonders on the imagination.
$12 is officially Too Much for me to lay down on a game whose content can be exhausted in a day.
I have not exhausted the content. Also, I have 18 hours played, and I always feel that if I get at least 1hr per $ spent, it is a good value.
Regardless, I have not even unlocked like half the content yet in the game. Plus scoring system and leaderboards.
Still playing Gems of War with the Stately Play folks.
Diablo III starts Season 13 this Friday, I’ve got a group that did Season 12 together, we’re planning on getting back together for Season 13, we enjoyed leveling and doing the Seasonal unlocks.
Rise of Flight has had a good 66% off sale going on, I dug out my joystick and picked up a few planes. Rise of Flight has been the leader in the niche within a niche as far as WWI flight simulations (http://www.wargamer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15828&p=23738#p23738). The successor was recently announced, development of Rise of Flight had essentially stopped as the team combined studios to work on the celebrated IL-2 Sturmovik combat flight simulation. The IL-2 Sturmovik series has continued development over the years, to include a newer game engine, and last year implemented Virtual Reality with glowing reports. All that background to say that WWI flight simulation is not dead, they’ve announced Flying Circus Vol. 1 for the series, “Our eventual goal is to essentially re-build ROF inside of the Sturmovik universe and give WWI all the latest technology like VR, 64bit, DX11 and improved visuals.”
So, I’m tinkering around in Rise of Flight now to get enough skill to try out a WWI flight simulation with Virtual Reality, when Flying Circus for IL-2 Sturmovik arrives. I have not done any VR gaming, but had thought that I would try it when it came out for a game that I was interested in playing without VR, where the addition of VR had the potential to increase the enjoyment, for me. 
I’m trying hard to get into Monster Hunter world but so far it hasn’t been all that easy. I’ve had a harder and harder time as I’ve gotten older getting in to games that are loaded with systems. I don’t mind complicated games, but when games layer systems upon systems upon systems I have a hard time caring to learn it all.
Rise of Flight is such a great game.
I actually bought a VR system for PS4 just this week. Barely had the chance to try it out, but it’s pretty nuts. I think I need to upgrade my computer and go whole hog on this tech.
I got to play a little PlayStation vr when I was visiting my friend in the uk. I was actually really impressed by the potential there. Most of it felt kinda tech demo-ey rather than fully fledged games, but that’s ok. My favourite by far was ‘the London heist’ and I couldn’t let the subject come up here without mentioning it
What’s crazy about World is that this is basically as clear and straightforward as the series has ever been, and it still doesn’t bother to explain basic mechanics. What weapon(s) have you been using? A lot of the systems/numbers can be avoided entirely depending on the weapon class you’re focusing on.
I’ve been using a lance and hiding behind a shield. Combat is ok, but it’s the secondary systems that get a bit too much. I feel like everything - and I mean everything - levels up. Heck, my footprint research has a level to it. And there are multi-layered menus for everything. Don’t get me wrong, I can definitely see the appeal to this game and I may have loved it a decade or more ago, but I just haven’t been convinced yet to give the game the time and attention that it seems to demand.
Roughly 90 percent of my play right now is Elder Scrolls: Legends.
I’m not without some minor complaints, but it has 10 times the depth of any other CCG I’ve ever tried. And 50 times the depth of Hearthstone (which I’ve perma-deleted from all devices).
Lance is a good, solid, easy to use weapon. The systems there are pretty easy.
Scout flies are a thing. The leveling up is actually contributing to a lot more than just the scoutflies. Research in the monster guide, which used to have to be gotten outside of the game, breakables and drops. It also adds research points that are used
Armor is also pretty easy now - there’s no mor worrying about how you get skills and so on. Unless you’re actually hunting for specific skills, making whole sets and upgrading them is really easy.
What are you getting hung up on?
The levels upon levels issue only becomes worse as you go on—there are alpha and beta sets of every armor unlocked at a certain point—so if that’s the sticking point then I wouldn’t fault you for throwing in the towel. Like I wrote in one of the Stately Scrying posts, it took me five attempts at learning Monster Hunter over the years before it really, truly clicked with this one. Before I heard about the streamlining that World was doing I had basically given up on MH. That time commitment/learning curve is why I’m not going out of my way to directly recommend it to people—time is valuable, and most of my attempts at getting into MH were in high school and college when I could afford to stubbornly pump twenty hours into a game before giving up.
Honestly, I’m dreading the release schedule picking up. I think Into the Breach next week might seriously eat into the time I’d like to put into hunting these monsters.
Rise of Flight is the best sim I’ve ever played. The planes are dead simple, so it’s not a matter of memorizing buttons or radar performance or any of that crap, just seat of your pants flying, and the planes themselves shake, rattle and roll to let you know if you’re pushing them too hard (of course that doesn’t mean I haven’t popped the wings off because I didn’t listen). It really gave me a visceral sense of just how fucking rickety they were, and what a death-defying feat flying them was. I have lusted for VR in that game since I first played it. The single player component could absolutely be better and drove me to try Wings Over Flanders Fields, which gets no end of accolades in that department, but the planes in that game were so well behaved thanks to the extreme age of the engine it’s built on I imagine that it took me right out. I was too used to the vehicle itself being a threat. You just cannot take anything for granted in RoF. Every takeoff and especially every landing is an adventure that can easily end in disaster, to say absolutely nothing of the fights themselves.
Can you explain why? It didn’t really grab me for some reason. The 2 lane mechanic was good in the story because they changed it up (windy, etc), but in the PvP modes, it was always Stealth on the right. The comeback mechanic (Draw card at x lost life and Prophecy) didn’t seem all that great either. And it has most of the Hearthstone mechanics (Standard mana pool, second player gets free mana, Taunt and so on).
I’m excited about VR coming to WWI flight simulation, myself! Other than some potential interest in Elite:Dangerous, up until the announcement of Flying Circus there was not a VR game that caught my enthusiasm and so had not invested in the hardware required for VR. 
That’s the truth, “Every takeoff and especially every landing is an adventure that can easily end in disaster”, I get a real sense of accomplishment just taking off and landing successfully in Rise of Flight!
In the current sale I had picked up the Gotha G.V bomber, which I then struggled with. Checking the description in the “Newcomer’s Multiplayer Plane Buying Guide 2.0” thread, I saw it was not just me … “very demanding but rewarding bomber to fly”, “Dangerous to fly, requires fine handling (autolevel helps a lot)”, “Dangerous to land, poor ground control”.
I never did try Wings Over Flanders Fields, not already owning a copy of Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 3, and it being single player only, I didn’t feel enough interest to pursue acquiring a copy. While I’m like the majority of folks that primarily play single player, I also like the option of participating in the multi-player servers, especially for the special events, if I so choose, and my understanding is that Rise of Flight then becomes basically the only option.
I have not yet tried Pat Wilson’s Campaign Generator, which I gather is what folks have migrated to for their single player campaign enjoyment. I plan on exploring it in the near future, especially since his primary focus with the continued development is the IL-2 series, so the experience with it in RoF should carry directly over to Flying Circus. My understanding is that Pat Wilson does receive some compensation from the IL-2 studio for his work, which gives me confidence that he has access to the developers for at least answers where needed for the continued development of his Campaign Generator.
Oh man, good heads up on the sale. I’m picking up the channel map and the Felixstowe for less than $6 American.
Spent most of the day playing Prey, and it is a bit of genius. The whole game is essentially one big level, and as you have your own customisable skillset and can find and/or craft tools, you can explore most of it right from the very start. That’s a terrible idea for several reasons, but you can. The game rewards exploration, especially my particular ferrety “what’s behind that pipe/what’s down the side of that staircase/what’s up on that ledge” instincts, and the environment feels like an actual space inhabited by humans, rather than a level. There are multiple ways past each obstacle, and I’ve never been happier being a grubby scientist/engineer/hacker type, building kit, fixing machines, putting out fires, hacking locks, and shooting the odd enemy when I can’t rig a turret to do it.
Sometimes I dabble in a little of this, a little of that. Sometimes my games are quick competitions like racing. And then sometimes I go all in.
I just started Persona 5.
