Weekly what have you been playing discussion - week of September 2nd, 2024

Dead Cells. I am absolutely in love with this game. I've beaten it on the normal difficulty a couple of times, and the next difficulty (hard) once. I just started on the next difficulty (very hard) but I'm a bit too tired tonight

I still have TONS of things to unlock. I never get bored of going back in. It continuously has me trying new combos and I end up finding things I enjoy that I may have not even tried

I haven't even explored everything yet, and there is some DLC bits I have to finish up. The Castevania DLC is spectacular. I highly recommend playing the game with all the content. It meshes into the base game perfectly, and you choose what path you want to take as you are playing

The enemies are varied, the difficulty is satisfying, the items and skills are plenty, and it is fucking addictive. The only complaint I could really have if I had to, is not enough MetroidVania. I'm not sure if they could really add much more though, and I love it just the way it is

I've returned to Minecraft because I found a great multiplayer survival server called Vanilly.

Shattered pixel dungeon- I hate this game so much but can't stop playing it.

Spiderman 2

I finally got around to restarting God of War. I played the first few hours on PS4 a while back, and was overwhelmed, felt like it threw too much at me all at once, and I couldn’t be bothered to learn all the combat and mechanics. I got it for PC and started fresh, took it slow and used exploration to learn all I could, and shit, now I get it, this game is a masterpiece. It looks gorgeous in 4K, and the combat is loads of fun. And quite possibly my favorite thing is getting to hear Teal’c again (I freaking love Christopher Judge).

Now I just need to play something mindless to fill the next few weeks before Ragnarok releases on PC.

I'm about half way through Conscript, which is essentially WW1 Resident Evil. This game has maintained its tense feeling by carefully dialing the presence of save points and ink items to use at them. I'm really enjoying it. Unfortunately, for the same reason, it makes it difficult to find a block of time that I know I'll have to make progress in the game, so I've prioritized playing other stuff for the past week.

I'm coming up on the end of Dread Delusion. In fact, I believe I'm on the final mission. On a much smaller scale, this game channels the same exploration formula of something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring, paying close attention to sight lines and making sure that you can use your brain to navigate the world, explore, and find something interesting. The game is certainly wider than it is deep, but they nailed the exploration part of the game, and I'd love to see them hone in on more RPG systems in a sequel or other follow-up.

I'm also a bit more than halfway through Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Without spoilers, I got to the part where they let you make a mechanical choice, and I picked the stealth-focused one. This is more of what made The New Order great, and they even cleaned up some of the mechanical issues that I had with The New Order on a gamepad, so they must have had the same complaints that I did.

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - counter

Street Fighter II: 3rd Strike - Had a friend visit from out of town, played a few rounds of 3S. Also managed to rope them into trying out Waku Waku 7 and Twinkle Star Sprites.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City - :(

Splatoon 3 - Probably justified, but damn the Edit paint nerf feels kinda harsh.

Started playing LoZ Oracle of Seasons. I never played the oracle games and so far they're great. Never realized how much I like the GB Zelda games.

Afterwards I think I'm gonna revisit the Golden Sun games.