Russia, Israel, Hamas - as always, top of the shit list. At least Russia gets the joy of war on their own territory, for a change.
Right, that out of the way, I always hear people this time of year going on about a "game drought" or some such. Funny thing being, that also makes this the time of year when games get put on deeper and deeper discounts, trying to lure the bored with their no-longer-shiny-new wares. For cheap bastard gamers like me, it's a veritable cornucopia of entertainment.
So, let's start out on the PC side of things. First off, Ubuntu's latest long-term stability release has matured a bit, so I started the weekend off updating my install to 24.04. I had to disable the bleeding-edge Mesa graphics driver package I was using (which I switched to from AMD's official drivers because they jumped the gun early on Ubuntu version support), but everything went through relatively cleanly. Still had to remind it about my 5.1 speaker setup, but, otherwise, it was quick and painless - and, so far at least, it's let me run games without resorting to third-party driver packages!
As for the games themselves, well, Helldivers 2 has fallen off my radar for the time being, but I finally picked up God of War, and I'm impressed with the level of polish overall, and the "excellent by video game standards" story I've seen so far. I'd probably be spending the weekend playing that, if ads and industry shows for Ara: History Untold and Civilization VII hadn't rekindled my Civ itch, but, instead, I've got Civilization VI installed now, in part just to see whether the crash-to-desktop issues I had when I played it last year have been fixed (not going to buy a new Civ game from a company that couldn't get their last game up to snuff, after all). Outside of that, honorable mention goes to Pepper Grinder, which is both unique and entertaining, but isn't suiting my palate at the moment.
Of course, most of my gaming time these days is on the couch, with my Steam Deck and Steam Controller hooked up to the TV. I've gone through Book of Hours a couple of times at this point (for a couple hundred hours playtime total), and I thought I was going to dive into Cult of the Lamb next (which gets honorable mention along with Feed the Deep), only to get blindsided by a not-much-more-than-a-visual-novel game called I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. The basic shtick with this game is, you start out as a 10-year-old on a newly-settled colony on the other side of a wormhole, you play through 13-month years until you reach the age of 20, with each month consisting of an action you choose played out through a card-based minigame where the cards are your memories. Oh, and you have odd memory-flashes of other/previous/alternate versions of what happens to your colony, which, at the very least, tell you that the world you're on isn't entirely peaceful (if the colonists getting knocked off by the local wildlife isn't enough of a clue).
That just leaves the XBox side of things to cover. Naturally, I'm puttering about in Starfield a bit more, to get in position for the new Shattered Space expansion that's coming next month. Outside of that, I did pick up a month of Game Pass to clear out my backlog of a score of "looks interesting, but not enough to buy or pick up Game Pass for on its own" games. Here's the highlights and lowlights, in no particular order:
- Hauntii is likely the best of the bunch, between its interesting pixelated monochrome look, interesting take on the afterlife, and its mix of haunting mechanics and relaxed twin-stick shooter controls. I'll probably buy this game, eventually.
- Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is... well, competent is the best I can say about it. If I wasn't comparing it directly against God of War, I might come up with something better, but every point of comparison I can come up with between the two swings God of War's way.
- Have a Nice Death is great. It's got clean mechanics and controls, great animation with a sense of humor, and you play as the Grim Reaper dealing with the corporate monstrosity you created to make things easier for yourself, long, long ago. The game just wants more time than I'm willing to give it, so odds are I won't get it unless it ends up in a Humble Bundle or something like that.
- Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is disappointing. I forced myself to play through the first chapter (which starts with you barely mustering the strength to climb off of the shore from a stormy shipwreck, and ends with you getting into sword-fights with multiple enemies before capturing a prisoner, all without resting), and it was a monochrome slog. I loved the original, too bad the sequel couldn't measure up.
- Lightyear Frontier was a pleasant surprise. It seems to be reasonably scoped for single-player play, and takes care of some of the early-game suspension-of-disbelief issues I have with most survival crafters. Sure, you can punch trees to get wood, if you've got a mech with a chainsaw attached to its arm, but you'll do better with more sweeping blows!
- Finally, a two-fer of disappointments with similar roots... the whole point of releasing on console is supposed to be that you have a known standard to code and test to! Flock looked like it could be a fun distraction, but audio issues scuttled that for me. Space Engineers looked like it could be interesting, but I noped out when I went to the help menus to look up controls and got a mess of keyboard bindings - you know, the keyboard that XBoxen don't usually have.
So, yeah, that's it for now. Looking forward to the Starfield expansion, resignedly anticipating day 1000 of Russia's stupidity, and watching Israel and Hamas talk wanting a cease-fire but doing their best to not actually get one, each for their own reasons. Yay games, I guess.
