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Crime O'Clock (NSW) by jp (Oct 22nd, 2026 at 08:43:00) |
I'm putting this back no the shelf now - mostly because I started to get a little tired of it. As I think about it, it's abit of a tricky design space and I can see how the design team was trying to keep things fresh and mix things up. They've added a little mechanic where you can tap on some objects that get highlighted to see what's inside. THere's also a "follow the musical pattern" in which you click on things on the map in the right order...following a musical script.
It's all "ok" - not particularly compelling, but I've started to get tired because the also isn't much I find interesting in the story. Each mission feels like "oh, here's a thing that happened, let's fix it" but the characters and the world aren't that compelling, and while there are neat things in the images - they're not really woven into the storytelling. So, I don't feel like I'm learning cool things about this weird/interesting world from the missions themselves - at most I pick things up from the artwork. It's a weird "miss" - because the artwork is super fun and neat to explore, there's cool details and characters - but it falls flat after that.
Also, playing on the Switch is more annoying than it should - I feel the controls are really imprecise - I need to move the cursor to a specific location and I overshoot/undershoot tweak and adjust and it's just...annoying.
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Kill Knight (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:28:37) |
Retiring this one too. It's a twin-stick shooter / bullet hell type of thing mixed with modern Doom. Slick, for sure, but I didn't know it would be so arcade-y. There's not much story to speak of, and it's basically a test of mastering the controls to beat, with additional motivation provided by leaderboards. It is fun, intense, for sure, but as with Civ 6 and Noita (although Kill Knight isn't long per se), I don't have the patience right now to commit to it. I might be at a point where I'm exhausted by more open-ended or twitch-based games. I could feel it with Drop Duchy (roguelite fatigue?), which I saw through to the end, but perhaps I should find something more story-heavy with a clearly defined ending for next.
Anyway, like I said, Kill Knight is slick. The controls gel really well. You use RT to shoot pistols, circle to melee attack, and LT to shoot like a shotgun spread. All the attacks synergize in different ways. You have to use melee to get shotgun ammo, for example, which incentivizes running up and slicing enemies. Each attack generates some kind of resource that you need for other attacks (or health, very important!), so you have to vary attacks. It really does feel like a twin stick shooter / bullet hell version of the newer Doom games. I think that's about it...
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Noita (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:12:28) |
My first thought was "this is like Spelunky." And of course it is because it's another roguelike where you go down, down, down into the depths, and the only way you get better is to die a hundred times, learn what killed you and why, and just skill up. Also learning the wand system, which is one of the two things that make this stand apart. The other is the pixelated destructible environments.
There are huuuuuundreds of enemies, spells, and perks. I saw like 5% of stuff and made it to the third "biome" a few times. In my longer runs, I had cool wands and spells, like spells that made my projectiles home or explode or that covered a wide range. The way it works is that each wand you find has stats (which seem to just randomly vary), including some number of spell slots. You can find/purchase spells, and you can move them around between wands. This means you can load up your favorite wand with a variety of useful/synergistic spells that'll help you kill enemies, move around, and explore the biomes. Perks are also helpful, like ones that make you immune to certain elements or that give you a little ghost companion to augment your damage output.
The destructible environments are cool. Each pixel is categorized as a type of material (e.g., wood, water, coal, gunpowder...), and they have various interactions. Wood burns, for example, so if you shoot a lantern and it falls on wood, it'll light up and maybe collapse. If you're on fire, go find water to put yourself out. I don't know what "blood" does, but I saw that it ticks up to 100% as you stand in it. Acid poisons you. Occasionally stuff blew up and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there are a lot more interactions. It reminded me of Divinity: Original Sin 2's elemental combat system.
Anyway, so what this looks like while playing is that you're zooming around (you have a jetpack and can float a bit; this replaces a typical game's jump), firing spells and getting fired at by enemies, blowing up the environment, trying to get gold (to purchase wands and spells), find secrets, do whatever, and ultimately get to the bottom of the biome, where you enter a portal and can buy upgrades and rearrange your spells, and then you go to the next biome. There is often a lot of fire/poison/projectiles/etc. on screen at once and it can feel pretty hectic.
I certainly appreciate the game and the ways that it makes something like Spelunky 2 feel traditional. There's a ton of customization with the wands, strategy in manipulating the environment, and so many things to discover. But having recently bashed my head against the Spelunky 2 roguelike wall for a while, I realize I have little interest in a similar head-bashing-against-the-wall experience playing Noita.
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Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 17th, 2026 at 17:37:02) |
Ugh. I'm not sure I want to continue playing. We'll see.
I've hit level 7 and I would say that the experience so far is really mixed. The game seems to want to encourage scavenging all the things. But, you hit a weight limit super fast - and it becomes really annoying to manage that, especially since you can't fast travel when you're encumbered. So, why bother?
I've also picked up all kinds of things that...I can't do anything with? Tings have "value" but I've yet to run into a store or any place where I can sell. So far everything has involved killing all the raiders/enemies - and the towns I've been setting up/helping out (two so far) don't have shops. Though I think I can build one if I get the materials? (something to try out the next time I play).
I also nearly worked myself into an unrecoverable position - I left a car manufacturing plant (running away from enemies) only to load immediately into 4 enemies right there. I don't know how I was able to survive them - a lot of luck I think, and more than a few tries. But it was really bad. I might have quit there if a few more tries hadn't worked out...
Also, so far at least, there's surprisingly little in the way of story/narrative. I'm surprised because it's a Bethesda game - so I was expecting a lot more.
I'm ignoring the wonky glitches and weird graphical things because that would be a bit unfair at this point (old game and all that, and I don't think it downloaded an update because I think the game's content servers are offline by now?)
Anyways, we'll see how much further I go...
Oh! The other thing that's really annoying is how hard/rare it is to find the item that decontaminates you such that you can heal back up. Every rad lowers your max health, but getting rid of rad has been SUPER hard/rare. Most of my time I'm running around with 1/2 health just because of the rad capping it.
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Shroom and Gloom (PC) by jp (Oct 17th, 2026 at 17:02:29) |
I played this enough to complete a full run with the starter character (this unlocked new characters - but I haven't gone back to play since). And WOW, the final boss fight was super stressful and cool. I'm feeling kind of lucky that I beat it on my first try actually. First try at the boss, not first run. I might have been 3 or four runs before I got that far...
..it's an interesting game! There's a new element in the "safe areas" where you also have a (separate) deck of cards that lets you do things in the safe areas - find new cards, upgrade stuff, and that sort of thing. When you get new cards they can either be for the combat part of the game or for the safe zones, and there's some neat interactions there. Interestingly, when you rest at a safe zone it can have negative consequences - but you only want to do it to draw a new hand of safe zone cards. I'm not sure I entirely understood how everything here worked - lots of card play reduces the "danger rating", but I don't know if it matters at all other than resting there. As in, does leaving a safe zone with a high danger rating mean harder combat later? A less safe state for the next safe zone? All of this I couldn't figure out from what I've played so far.
There was some stuff I thought was a bit unfair - there are some things in the safe zone that you can play a card to unlock, but some require multiple cards - and more than once I left a safe zone without having unlocked the thing. It felt like I had wasted those cards on a thing I didn't know I couldn't unlock - and as far as I could tell, the progress towards unlocking is reset when you leave.
Visually, the game is so cool - it's like a slicker version of Inscryption.
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they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
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if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
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2323 registered gamers and 3391 games. 7931 GameLogs with 13447 journal entries. 5110 games are currently being played.
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Fallout 3 (360) by Breknbrn |
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most recent entry: Monday 14 September, 2009
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Summary
Fallout 3 is a first-person RPG. You start off in an underground vault as just a little kid. When you grow up your dad decides to leave the vault and wander out in the wasteland for some unknown reason. You decide to follow your dad out of the vault and into the wasteland to learn why he left. During your journey in the wasteland you do a lot of quest to try to find your dad and why he left the vault in the first place. While doing the main quests you learn that your dad is involved with something called Project Purity. Project Purity is a machine that purifies water so that it doesn't have any radiation in it. Your dad dies while trying to complete project purity but fails and you decide to take his place.
Gameplay: Hour 1
For the first hour I really enjoyed using the new weapons that I got from the aliens. The cut scenes made it feel like I was really being abducted by aliens. The aliens looked like the way aliens are usually generalized as, little green men.
The spaceship was huge and I had to do a lot of exploring to find out where I was supposed to be going. The aliens were easily killed with one or two shots to the head. Their guns that I picked up turned whoever was killed with them to ashes half of the time or I blew their heads clean off of them.
I met some other people that had been abducted as well. With their help I went around the ship trying to find a way back to Earth. After a while I got to the engine core and in a room next to the engine room there was a lab that had some people frozen in cryotubes. I unfroze them a learned that they consisted of an army medic, a cowboy, a Japanese samurai, and an astronaut. The astronaut died after I unfroze them. That is as far as I got to during my first hour of gameplay.
Gameplay: Hour 2
For the second hour I finished playing the add-on and because I was caught up in the game I went well past an hour of gameplay. As I continued to explore the ship I disabled the engine by destroying some power generators. The generators were in the cryolab, and the robot assembly room. I didn’t like the fact that it took me almost 45 minutes to destroy the generator in the robot assembly room because it was unclear where to go until I was attacked by an alien drone. After I destroyed both of the generators I had to go out into space. I was kind of disappointed because I didn’t get to do much while I was out in space. I kind of wanted to shoot some aliens that could have been flying around with jetpack or something.
When I got back inside the ship I learned that the aliens were going to destroy the Earth with a death ray. To do this I had to shut down some more generators to disable the death ray from firing for a while. After that I went up to the control room to take out the rest of the aliens. Taking over the control room was way too easy. There were only two enemies in the entire control room and the captain was just as easy to kill as any of the other aliens. That really disappointed me. I soon got over that when another spaceship appeared and I had to take it out with the death ray. What I really liked about this was that I could sit in the captain’s chair and fire the death ray like I was a real captain. I also like the fact that they made it more difficult because groups of aliens came in from time to time during the firefight. When I destroyed the second spaceship it exploded like the death star in Star Wars. With the destruction of the second spaceship the quest was complete and I was able to go back to Earth.
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