Gaming

Hello everyone. We're now a quarter of the way through the year already. Kinda wild to think, but what games have you been playing?

Yesterday I was playing solo PEAK and I finally got the achievement for climbing the mountain in under an hour, and with a blisteringly fast time... and after I almost completely fucked it in Kiln by wasting a piton, a rope cannon, and an energy drink.

I also started Red Dead Redemption 2. There was supposedly a glitch where people were able to unlock every single achievement by merely booting up the game and not even leaving the main menu... which I couldn't get to work (for journalistic purposes of course), but since I have one of the best video games of all time taking up a quarter of my computer's disk space, I might as well enjoy it while it's there. I'm beyond shocked that I can actually run it, but it's working pretty well.

Hello everyone. It's a new month. What are you all up you? There's not much in the ways of new games for me, but what I have been doing is making progress on my custom Hearthstone year, Year of the Serpent.

The Eldritch Fate (Set 1) - Lazul predicts (or more accurately, manifests) a terrible tragedy for everyone with her skills as a fortune teller and her corrupted tarot deck. - All 22 cards of the Major Arcana have been adapted into Hearthstone cards. When there's Lazul involved, you can bet that the Old Gods are only a step away from spreading havoc across all of the land. Foretell is a new mechanic that gives you the option to place a card in your hand on top of your deck to activate an optional bonus effect. With the dark, disturbing sounds and stories constantly beaming around in your head, Echo has come back for the entirety of the standard year and all three sets will use it.

Last, but certainly not least is the new Aberration minion type, and their gimmick is that they copy the gimmicks of every other minion type. Some of them have the "holding a Dragon" condition. Some of them have the "if you played an Elemental last turn" condition, etc etc, you get the idea. A secondary gimmick is that they also have two effects chosen at random, but are worth roughly equal amounts of mana (i.e Upside Down Mothergate) because they're a bit chaotic.

Ascent of the Redemption Peaks (Set 2) - Throughout Hearthstone's many years, there have been several archetypes and class mechanics that have failed to make any real impact on the game and/or were abandoned by the developers. Archetypes like Freeze Shaman, No-Spell Mage, and Heal Druid. Left in the dust long ago when people stopped caring about them. Some of them died after the first wave of support, never to be returned again. Each class represents a past archetype or mechanic in the class that the team doesn't support anymore and give them one more chance at glory.

Those who seek a new chance at fate climb Mount Everset, a mountain known to have magical properties, and legend has it that those who reach the top of the mountain will reach enlightenment and change the course of their life itself. Kaytu is a pandaren monk who lives on the mountain whose job it is to help guide climbers on their journeys to the top. He knows better than anyone that everyone and everything has a story to tell. Legacy is new keyword that gives you a second Hero Power with the base card's effect when you play it. It expires after one use, but if you play more Legacy cards, their Legacy effects will stack onto your existing Legacy Hero Power. The mountain range also has stories to tell all around it, with each class getting a Sidequest that summons a location when it's completed.

Jackpot at Casino Rafaam (Set 3) - After the League of EVIL disbanded, Rafaam sought new job opportunities, and opened his own casino in the process. Casino Rafaam became the most popular gambling paradise across all the lands, though given Rafaam's past evil nature, we wouldn't put it past him if this was part of a scheme. As you'd expect from a casino run by Rafaam though, the fairness is a bit questionable. Cards with Marked are visible to you while they're on top of your deck. From here, you can either pay 1 mana to draw them or play them straight from the top of your deck as though it were in your hand. If you're feeling really lucky, there's a secondary Raise mechanic which puts an effect into a prize pot and if you win, you get the effects Raised into the prize pot. There are only a few of these cards, but feel free to use them if you feel like high-rolling.

Where is Rafaam in this? He's not only running the casino, but he's also gathered some of his Ethereal friends to help run the place up. Ethereals are a new minion type coming to Hearthstone in this set. As traders and collectors of all sorts of weird items, Ethereals are largely about giving you extra cards. Lots of Ethereals have effects that draw cards or create them into your hand, and if a card was put there specifically by an Ethereal, it may have an additional synergistic bonus.

How about you? What are you all doing?

IT'S SO FLUFFY!!!

I can't believe it's already February.

Over in the Eastern US, there's been a lot of snow and some snowstorm warnings, though thankfully I've managed to keep power the whole time. I know in Australia, temperatures have been raising up to 50 Celsius (an American acknowledging non-American measurements, a sign of the apocalypse, I know!). How has the weather been for you guys? Hopefully not too bad.

What have you been playing?

After Old School Rally disappointed me, I was hoping my next indie rally game would be better...

And I'm not quite so sure what to make of it. It's not bad, but it feels like there's a lot lacking. It's just worse Art of Rally, which is a fantastic indie rally racer.

In other news, I got five PS5 games for Thanksgiving-Christmas and of as today, I've still only played two of them. Backlog curse.

First off, Happy New Year. We're so far into the 2020s and I really can't believe it. New year means new games.

My final major contribution and game I played was Old School Rally, and I was really excited for it, but it ultimately was just so disappointing. Despite that, I'm likely going to keep playing it anyway because the achievements are quite easy to get (even if one of them is grindy).

As I mentioned last month, I'm now a Stardew Valley player, courtesy of one of my best friends gifting it to me for Christmas. I've been playing it with her and her husband, and it's a great way for the three of us to just chill out and enjoy time with each other.

We've already at December of this year. Holy shit.

What are you playing?

Because of family circumstances, we decided to open presents on Thanksgiving instead of Christmas to accommodate everyone's travel plans. With that, I got a lot of PS5 games. I'm currently playing Ghost of Yotei.

Other games I got in my presents were The Outer Worlds 2, Death Stranding 2, Horzion Forbidden West, and F1 25. It might be a while before I truly get to them though, haha.

I'm currently on my way to achievement grind my way through all of the WRC games. Or at least, the ones I can get.

There are some that I can't get anymore because online achievements are a sin and should not exist.

I have found my PS5 and hopefully I will get that set up at this house and start playing it again.

Can't believe it's already October. What the heck is happening?

I'm making my way through Haste. Really fun game, but it will kick your ass twice over if you don't mess with the difficulty options.

From the Autumn Sale, I also now own all of the WRC games except for EA Sports WRC. Gonna make my way through achievement hunting those. Speaking of achievement hunting, here's a thread if you want to celebrate some hunts or request help through them.

Welcome to the Achievement Hunters Thread. Achievements/Trophies are a really cool (in my opinion anyway) part of gaming culture from the seventh-generation onwards. In this thread, you can share some achievements for games that you're really proud of. Maybe you finally got every single one for a game that you've played for a really long time.

Additionally, this can also be used as a place to ask for achievement help. Online achievements suck when no one plays the game online anyway. If you find someone here that happens to own the same game you're hunting the online achievements for, the two of you can arrange a time to go co-op achievement hunting!

Whether you're hunting on PC, Xbox, PlayStation. Hell, if you're a RetroAchievements user, you've come to the right place. We celebrate and collaborate on unlocking these digital trophies.

Brand new month. Brand new thread.

I'm in the middle of playing some of my Steam backlog whilst inevitably buying more games later down the road and making that backlog even bigger. I do intend to update my Steam wishlist, and the number of perfect Steam games I have has gone up to 14. My most recent addition to that collection is Sleeping Dogs.

Hello everyone. What are you playing this month?

I finally got around to playing Celeste after it's been sitting on my Steam library for over a year.

As you can probably tell, I have felt some pain. But it's pain that came with a lot of fun and a good story. I ended up collecting 100 strawberries before reaching the top of the mountain, with just a little over 1000 deaths on my first playthrough.

Beyond that, I've also picked up a few games for super cheap on the Steam Racing Fest. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a racing game junkie to my core.

I'd love to hear what you guys are up to.

The Steam summer sale started just a week ago and is still ongoing. What have you picked up in that time?

I'm giving a special mention to Dungeons of Hinterberg. Really fun game that takes a genre combo that seems unlikely to work, but it somehow manages to... make it work. In fact, I wrote a review on it.

It's a new month which means I'm asking you guys what's going with you guys.

First off. Happy Pride Month! I'm flying the Asexual flag colors on my avatar as I do every year. However you spend the month, I hope you have fun.

I've been writing a lot of guides for RollerCoaster Tycoon guides as part of a giant project I call "Project Sawyer". Which is a list of hundreds of guides I plan to write, and the number has slowly gone up over time. Previously it was 386, then 397, and now it's standing at 407. Here's a link to my spreadsheet if you want to see exactly what beast I'm tackling here. This is a very ambitious project that will likely take me literal years to complete, but I believe I can do it.

Naturally this means that I've also been playing these games quite a lot too. I've been trying to learn Simutrans, which is inspired by OpenTTD. VERY difficult to learn. Other transporting games I could learn fairly quickly, but not this one.

So... what about you guys?

What have you been playing?

You may have noticed that I put four reviews up over the week. Naturally I've been playing a lot of those games for quite a while now (especially Locomotion. I've played a LOT of Locomotion).

Last month, one of my best friends and her husband also bought Minecraft for me out of the blue to give the three of us an extra thing to bond over. And as is typical in my limited Minecraft adventures: My first instinct is to build a house on top of a tree.

So, first off, it is April Fools Day when I post this, but it is a genuine discussion post. Happy April Fools day or whatever days on the month you might be celebrating.

Late March has been a fun time for me. Most people here know that I'm a longtime fan of RollerCoaster Tycoon, but the past week and a half has seen me giving a run of Chris Sawyer's other games, OpenTTD and Chris Sawyer's Locomotion.

Suffice to say that I don't really have that much idea of what I'm doing, but it's fun to try these games. I was 8 years old when I first tried to play RCT and didn't know what to do, and here I am 17 years later in the same exact spot with the man's other games.

Speaking of RCT, I'm also trying RCT3 for the first time in my life:

Long post with lots of images. But how are you guys gaming this month?

Hey, folks! Decided to start a new thing where we, as a community, give away codes we don't want. I'm sure a lot of us have codes from Humble Bundles or e-mails that we don't want to play or have since gotten somewhere else (like on Epic or through Prime Gaming). This thread is for giving away such codes so others can enjoy them. Now, before we begin:

DON'T POST THE CODES DIRECTLY

There's bots lurking around that will steal them. It happens a lot on Reddit. I don't know if our site is affected, but better safe than sorry. Post a code, replace some letters with question marks, then post what the letters are.

Here's two codes:

• ???81D68AD2F91FAFB
  • Missing letters: RDR
  • What it is: Massive GOG discount for the Metro series, it's 2033 Redux, Last Light Redux, Exodus, and all the DLC for 88% off (about 7 euros)
  • This one only lasts for a little over 20 hours, so get it while it's hot!
• ?9M4Y-F3KND-BA?P3
  • Missing letters: X in both spots
  • What it is: Steam key for Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Let us know if you redeem the codes, so people don't just try to get them.

A little bit late to the punch because we've been busy, but here is the thread for this month. Let me know what you guys are doing.

I myself am not doing anything specific. I'm in the process of moving, and haven't really focused on one game in particular.

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

I'm a little early, but January can't go away soon enough lol. Not gonna go into more detail than I already have: suffice to say, it sucked.

At any rate, in terms of games I'm currently looking to play, I've got two plates spinning: I bought Eternal Strands on a whim, and I'm currently downloading Marvel's Spider-Man 2 because as we've already established, I'm impulsive.

Eternal Strands is like Shadow of the Colossus meets Immortals: Fenyx Rising, but with some cool additions. You utilize Frost, Fire, and/or Gravity powers to overcome challenges, and the game is quite rewarding of creativity: you can make a dragon fall from the sky by freezing its wings, or create a gravity-pocket and set it off as you jump on it to launch yourself into the air. My favorite thing so far has been the crafting system, of all things: I usually don't care much to craft stuff, but Eternal Strands is nice enough to let you Reforge your items with better materials really easily, and nothing is lost. All of your used materials go right back to your inventory if you swap them out; it's really convenient. This is balanced by inventory-management while you're out in the field, but I'm okay with that - the challenge of the game would be snapped in half if you could just hoover up everything you wanted.

As for future stuff, most of the games I'm looking forward to come out in the late-March/April window. February is pretty lean - for me at least - although I do have my eye on Avowed. Never played a Monster Hunter game before, so while I am semi-intrigued by MH Wilds, I'll probably pass on it.

I was thinking of doing something different in the early parts of 2025, and ask for opinions as-to which game I should review next! It could be any title, I suppose, but if it happens to coincide with my backlog, even better lol.

As it stands, I have a few Timely Reviews I want to work on eventually:

• Lies of P
  • Action Soulslike, dark retelling of the tale of Pinocchio.
  • Should be getting a DLC sometime in the first quarter of this year.
• Sea of Stars
  • Indie RPG of the classic/"old school" variety.
  • Played a little; also has an expansion coming out soonish.
• We 💜 Katamari Reroll
  • Goofy Japanese title where you roll up items/people into an ever-growing ball.
  • I don't believe I've played the sequel, but the original was super fun.
• Fallout 4
  • Western First-Person Sci-fi RPG.
  • I got sidetracked from doing it in time for the Fallout show on Amazon; what better time than before season 2?
• Black Myth: Wukong
  • Action Soulslike, but don't let the developers see me call it that.
  • I'm on Chapter 3, but became overwhelmed by stress (not from the game; just life in general). I want to finish it someday.
• Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
  • Action RPG, fighting the gods in the age of gunpowder. 
  • Played for about 5 hours but at the time it ran poorly; decided to wait for a patch yet never went back.

Let me know if any of these tickle your fancy, or suggest something else if you'd like! 🙂

What are you up to this month? Have any games in mind for the future? Let us know in the comments below!

It's a new year, if you didn't notice, which means it's time to get excited about all the games that might/will come out in 2025. My list includes Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Borderlands 4, Lunar Remastered Collection, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and more. It's gonna be a packed year, for sure! Of course, we don't yet know when they will come out, so in the more immediate future I have the Marvel's Spider-Man 2 port to Steam as my next-closest game to be interested in.

Currently, I am going back-and-forth between Path of Exile 2 and my modded run of Baldur's Gate III. I bought a Horipad Steam Controller from Amazon - although I'm still waiting for it to arrive - and with that fancy new device I'll have everything I need to play (& review!) games...except maybe a better computer lol. I've got my Switch, my PlayStation 5 as backup, a PC that can run Steam, a Steam Deck, and now the controller.

The Horipad is supposed to have programmable buttons, so it damn well better be able to take screenshots with the push of a button! I'll be really annoyed otherwise: pressing F12 on a Keyboard + Mouse setup is really hard mid-gameplay, and pulling screenshots off the Steam Deck can be annoying. I hope the controller is the perfect middle-ground option.

I'm hoping to review even more games this year; new ones, of course, but also some older titles via our "Timely Reviews" line. It irked me a little that my "favorite games of 2024" article was literally just the ones I reviewed lol - I need more! I am also hoping to do a light bit of game-streaming: not such that you can see my face or hear my voice, per se, but just dipping my toes in the water while I play games with my sister in the passenger seat (like when we were kids).

Hey, folks! The Game Awards are about to start, and we have a bingo board for you to have some fun during the presentation.