Hello to my fellow Americans, hope you are making the most of your long weekend. I finished my BG3 playthrough as “The Dark Urge”. I think the Urge origin character is a very fun playthrough, and enhances the story a bit because now your character is intertwined with the main villians, rather than just some guy who happened to also be on the Nautaloid. I also used this playthrough to experiment with different playstyles, and I gotta say, having 2 paladins in your party is OP. Hope everyone is having a safe weekend
Tactical Breach Wizards is good. Very entertaining writing, great gameplay.
I’ve been watching Northernlion play it on stream
Picked up Crosscode again
As I remember it, super fucking polished and smooth on Steam Deck. Gonna finish it this time! In the early hours, haven’t been gaming much this week, instead read Piranesi (loved it).
I ran into a weird issue on the steam deck where aiming gets stuck pointing northeast if you circle it around. Was so annoying I put it down until it gets fixed.
Haven’t run into that yet, using proton 7.
Piranesi was so good.
I know! I loved the inqusitiveness of the protagonist, and the mystery was really well-paced!
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis :3
Ogre makes me so fucking happy and I could play it forever. Still absolutely ecstatic that they made a smol one for GBA.
Finished the Ashlands in Valheim this weekend, gotta go back and finish CrossCode
I deleted all of my games because I found them too addictive. RIP the gaming era.
I’m not american and I always forget that yanks don’t celebrate it in May like everyone else does
Team Fortress 2, Balatro, and Super Mario Eclipse (Sunshine romhack)
Just finished Dishonored for the first time.
Final Fantasy 15 comrades dlc. It’s like monster hunter for babies. I totally understand why I’m the lone, singular player on the entire global server at all times. If it weren’t for the ffxv lore, I wouldn’t be playing it either.
Nothing because I’m too tired
Prior to this though I did some more Victoria bullshit, trying to get the “betray two allies as Italy” achievement but nobody will go to war and it’s 1910…
Also tried out Vampire Survivors coop which is exactly as batshit as you’d think. Steam Remote Play’s bitrate can NOT keep up.
I’m trying to help a partner with some maplestory quest (I’ve never played this game) and it’s going terribly
May play a little Valorant later
I’ve been playing Black Myth Wukong. I’m really enjoying it so far. All those years of soulslike’s have trained me for this. I really really like the dodge system in this game as it heavily rewards you for doing it “perfect”. The setting and lore are absolutely amazing and the vibes are simply incredible.
3/4 of the way through Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Mostly in a cycle of becoming BFFs with my party members, grinding a few levels, then advancing the story for the next batch of new wild shit to do, which usually includes new buddies. Definitely hitting the part of the JRPG arc where just “hit harder” is no longer sufficient and I’m doing a lot more buff/debuff setup to keep fights manageable.
Oh interesting, 7 was very much beatable with just mashing basic attack, which was a large part of why I didn’t enjoy it.
Halo: Reach firefight and Black Ops 2 bot matches while I listen to podcasts
Made a really fun custom firefight setting that’s "lore accurate"ish that I like a lot and Black Ops 2 let’s you make the pick 10 custom class system pick 17, so you can deck out your classes with a bunch of perks and attachments.
BO2 vs bots is absolutely goated. So many fun memories of my and my brother playing Nuketown against 12 bots
Kill confirmed to 300 where kills are worth 1 and confirms are worth 2. Picking up the floaty dogtags and seeing number go up makes my brain make the good chemical
Haven’t actually played anything so far this weekend, but I’ve been bashing my head up against Malenia on and off for a few dozen hours over the last few weeks. I’ll get there eventually (I’m being very stubborn–no summons, no cheese strats, just me and my trusty katana), but man, it’s really testing my patience. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not great at Elden Ring, but I’m at least competent enough that I managed to get past every single boss up to this point without too much struggle (maybe spent 2, 3 hours max on the worst ones?). Kinda baffling to me that they’ve left the encounter in its current state; I saw some pretty compelling evidence that she was originally a Sekiro boss, which would explain why her flurry attack doesn’t mesh well with the Elden Ring playstyle. In the last few hours of gameplay I switched from just trying to be super aggressive and hope that I can down her fast enough to avoid her most broken attacks (got very close a handful of times but it felt like pure RNG) to mostly parrying (among other things, playing more defensively makes it easier to interrupt her flurry with Freezing Pots), and while it’s a bit of a learning curve it also feels way more consistent and fun.
Also, this isn’t playing a game, but I worked through this nice little introductory tutorial on reverse engineering GBA games today and had a lot of fun with it! I really want to contribute to one of the many game dissassembly/decompilation projects out there but it’s pretty intimidating, so I’m trying to get the basics under my belt so I don’t have to be coddled too much by the main contributors. I don’t really like writing programs from scratch that much (I just write some basic utility scripts to automate things), but I love figuring out how things work and I’m detail-oriented, so reverse engineering seems like a perfect fit.
Kinda baffling to me that they’ve left the encounter in its current state
For what it’s worth, the game assumes you’re going to use spirit summons. It’s kind of annoying because the boss AI hasn’t really been updated since DS1 so the game doesn’t really respond to them well, but it is what it is.
I saw some pretty compelling evidence that she was originally a Sekiro boss
Unless you saw something new, IIRC there was no real proof of this. There was a lot of speculation that Malenia was based on an unused Tomoe fight, but there are no signs anywhere in Sekiro’s files of such a boss. Zullie the Witch put out a video a whlie ago pointing out that Malenia’s animations would probably be close to Genichiro’s as he uses Tomoe’s style, but they’re very different.
i would say for malenia it’s better to not rush. I think with a lot of elden ring bosses they train you to DPS race the boss and malenia’s heal mechanic I think is there to bait you into thinking it’s a DPS race. But it’s actually better to learn her moveset that is relatively limited and predictable and chip her down.
i think a lot of elden ring bosses, especially melania and the dlc bosses, are showing cracks in the dodge, dive, dip, duck, and dodge playstyle. The next from game will have perfect parry/blocking like sekiro and lies of p, there’s no other way forward.
