Last Game You Played

[Kyng]

RimWorld

I'm about two thirds of the way through my first year now - and I have 6 colonists. I still have my starting three; one was a prisoner who got recruited; one joined voluntarily; and one found refuge with us after fleeing from a nearby colony. And I do still have my starting three.

I'm in the process of building a greenhouse so that I can grow food year-round. However, operating the greenhouse requires Sun Lamps - which can generate the light required for plants, but which consume a massive amount of power. So I need some means of generating all that power - which is going to need lots of wind turbines (and essentially solar panels!)

[Moonface]

Pathogenic (PC)
Did the daily like I do every morning, died during it, and decided I wanted to at least get a winning run before stopping so tried doing the Recombination experiment with the Nanobot. Ended up being so overpowered I entered an Endless Run and went for the Brain boss for the first time.

Minecraft: DeceasedCraft v5.11.19 (PC)
Been enjoying this a lot since it received some major updates that made it worth jumping back into it with @ShiraNoMai. Currently we're trying to decorate and fortify our base, and I'm glad we're both playing because it would be a nightmare trying to put up walls and stuff by myself while zombies keep trying to attack me. I'll know if she reads this because I'll probably get looked at like I'm crazy but I'm starting to get a little tempted to enable the zombie animals that are locked to Apocalypse difficulty.

Slay the Spire 2 (PC)
Daily runs as usual given there isn't really much else to do except do runs for the fun of it until a new update drops, which might be a while since the developers were taking some time off recently.

Balatro (PC)
I have one challenge left to do in the game which is Jokerless, and I hate how many times I've come so close to winning only to draw bad hands repeatedly, even when I think I've set my deck up to avoid doing it!

[Mr EliteL]

Mario & Luigi Brothership

Hadn't played it for a while, pretty since I was doing the Archipelago run when I was playing Superstar Saga. Brothership is unfortunately not as good as SS and made me realise that more when I played it again today, as I was furthering some progress on in Brothership. Feels slow to play, but I'll try to continue through until the end. Not sure where I am at the moment and how much I have left. I might be 1/4 of the way, but that's just a guess.

Omega Labyrinth Life

I got this game quite a long while ago mainly because I wanted to have another game similar to Izuna and Touhou Genso Wanderer, and yes this game plays like them which I'm happy with. There is more to it than that however one being a simple flower planting side to it which is nothing really, but some stuff I should have checked beforehand too. It was on like a £20 deal though! Still, won't bother me anyway.

[Dragon Lord]

Paper Mario (NS)

Started up this game last week finally, got to right after defeating the Ninja Turtle knockoffs, and then my Switch died. Sadly found out the hard way that even if you save the game while playing, if you don't actually close the game at all and your Switch dies, NSO won't actually keep your saves so I had to start over from the beginning. Thankfully I wasn't too far into the game, but still kind of killed my interest in the game a bit so going back through what I've already played has been a very slow progress.

Pokemon Heart Gold

Been playing this on my AYN Thor and it's been an absolute blast experience the game with such higher quality screens and improved textures. Right now I'm at Goldenrod City working on my Eevee's happiness so I can evolve it into Espeon immediately, so I'll be stuck here for a while.

Elden Ring: Nightreign (PC)

Continuing my journey to try and get to Depth 5 in Deep of the Night, but it's not going too well. The closest I've gotten is Depth 4 at 4,900/6,000 points. Went on a horrid losing streak due to some horrendous teammates and am now back down in Depth 3. Think I went on like a five or six game losing streak. I can definitely see why a lot of people don't recommend trying to get to Depth 5 in random trios, because you can end up with some really, really bad teammates. Then you start playing really badly because you're trying to be too aggressive and get impatient and start making a lot more mistakes than normal.

What really sucks though is that in Depth 4, you only get 150-300 points per win, depending on the conditions of the match, but every loss is like 500-600 points. So it only takes one loss to undo 3-4 wins. But I'll continue trying to claw my way there. Getting to Depth 5 is the only thing left in the game I haven't accomplished, so I'd like to get it done and then maybe I can start pulling myself away from this game a little bit more.

Vernal Edge (PC)

This is a game I've had for quite a while on Steam, but never got around to playing it. However, I've noticed that physical copies of the game for PS4 and PS5 are starting to become more scarce, so I wanted to finally get around to trying it so I can see if it's something I'd enjoy enough to go out and get copies of it for those systems before they become too expensive/hard to find. So far it's decently fun. Nothing too ground break in the Metroidvania scene in terms of its exploration, but I do kind of enjoy that they attempted to make the combat more combo focused instead of as basic as it is most of the time in these types of games.

[Kyng]

Transport Fever 2

I'm up to 1935 in this game (started in 1850), so I'm roughly halfway to the present from where I started .

One thing I've found is that this game feels a lot 'smaller' than the original Transport Fever. City growth is quite a bit slower: at this point in the game, my largest cities have between 800 and 900 people in them - whereas in the original Transport Fever, my largest cities would've had about 3,000 people at this point in the game! With so few people, it's not a good idea to build railways connecting every city to every other city: you have to be a bit more selective with which connections you make.

(With that being said, I can't help but think that, in this game, 'person' is a somewhat abstract notion. It doesn't mean those cities literally only only have 900 people in: that wouldn't be much of a city . Rather, I think of them as "units of population", each of which represents multiple actual people!)

[Moonface]

Paper Mario (NS)
Started up this game last week finally, got to right after defeating the Ninja Turtle knockoffs, and then my Switch died. Sadly found out the hard way that even if you save the game while playing, if you don't actually close the game at all and your Switch dies, NSO won't actually keep your saves so I had to start over from the beginning. Thankfully I wasn't too far into the game, but still kind of killed my interest in the game a bit so going back through what I've already played has been a very slow progress.

This makes so little sense to me considering NSO games can be played offline for up to 7 days before you have to reverify your membership, and being offline means your saves aren't being kept on the NSO service or even communicating with it.


Slay the Spire 2 (PC)
It has been a long time since a daily run was so utterly shit it made me ALT + F4 the game. Tried it last night in co-op with Shira, we died within like 3 floors. Tried again, did a little better, but the whole time I was plagued with the gripe I have with the daily which is the card rewards were just awful. Single player this morning didn't fare much better.

Balatro (PC)
Trying to beat the Orange stake on the red deck, but haven't managed to get a good build going yet. Gave up for now when I skipped a blind for a free polygraphic Joker only for it to be hit with the Orange stake condition of only lasting for 5 rounds before it poofs.

Pathogenic (PC)
Did a few more experimental runs to get the achievements for them.

Minecraft: All The Mods 10 (PC)
Haven't played this mod pack in a long while but wanted to go back to it while I wait for DeceasedCraft to get its next update. Been trying to work through a new mod that was added called NeoVitae but I'm currently stumped at how to get a good source of blood going for the higher tier rituals. Anything I've tried so far causes the blood to run out faster than I can replenish it which then makes the ritual get cancelled. >.<

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, I don't get it either. Thankfully I wasn't too far into the game, so it didn't take long to get back to where I was.

Elden Ring: Nightreign (PC)

Continue to be stuck in Depth 4 hell. I'll go on a great run of 4-5 wins in a row, but then get one loss and all of the progress is just instantly gone. Kind of mad at myself for my last game tonight, which resulted in a loss. It was against Dreglord, who I am very good at fighting, and my teammates kept dying (I hadn't died at all). He had about 50% health remaining in phase 2, which I can no-hit pretty reliably, but instead of just focusing on fighting him and slowly getting the win, I didn't want to leave my teammates down just to sit there and watch for 5-10 minutes. So I kept trying to revive them, but unless you're playing Guardian or Revenant, who both have Ults that can instantly revive from 3-bars, it's nearly impossible to revive two teammates on your own while dealing with boss aggro. Which eventually resulted in me taking my eye off of the boss at the wrong moment and that snowballed into me finally going down for the first time in the fight. Our Revenant had a Wending Grace (revives you if you're holding it and the entire team goes down), but seemingly didn't have their Ult charged and ended up dying immediately again.

If I had just ignored my teammates and just focused on fighting the boss, I could have easily beaten him and got us the win. But instead I wanted to be a "good teammate" and try to get them up so they could actually play the game. Very dumb decision on my part for two reason:

1) As I mentioned, I'm capable of flawlessly fighting this boss and I could have pulled out the win on my own, even if it would have been a bit of a slog.

2) They both repeatedly died multiple times right after being revived, so I should have been smart and knew that even if I got them back up, they'd just both immediately die again.

After this experience, I'm definitely just going to leave my teammates on the ground next time it's against a boss I'm really good at fighting and I know I can win without them after they've both died repeatedly. Sometimes being a "bad teammate" is the best thing you can do for the team. If I ever want to reach Depth 5, I need to stop risking runs like that just to try and make sure everyone can be involved in the fight.

Paper Mario (NSO)

I'm in Dry Dry Desert now, still pretty early in the game. Really not sure if I'm liking this game so far though. How long it takes to level up and how much of a slog battles can be at times really eats away at the enjoyment. I really don't like how the game works with damage either. Like the game gives you almost no incentive to increase anything other than HP on level ups, because when everything only does 1-4 damage to you, just pumping your HP can be the only thing you need to do to trivialize the entire game. Maybe later in the game things hit harder and that's where you want more FP/BP to spam specials/have better badges equipped, but so far the game just seems like there's no point in anything other than HP and just being too bulky for anything to even threaten you.

I'll of course wait until I'm through most of the game before forming solid judgements on anything, but if the early parts of the game are anything to go by, I don't think I'm going to hold this game too highly by the end of it.

Pokemon HeartGold

Haven't been doing anything in this game except for giving Eevee haircuts every day to get that happiness up. I will not leave GoldenRod city until I have a level 6 Espeon.

[Moonface]

@Dragon Lord: I've not played the original Paper Mario to know how it compares, but I don't recall TTYD feeling like it had slow levelling or that high HP made fights/damage trivial. @Mr EliteL would probably know better than me though, just because I know he has more experience with Paper Mario games than I do.

Pathogenic (PC)
I've spent hours trying to do a Boss Rush run to beat the Brain boss within 28 minutes, thinking it would qualify because selecting it didn't grey out the challenge. I just won a run finally, and learned that it doesn't complete the challenge...

[Dragon Lord]

It's definitely still feeling that way. Every level up and I just level HP because there doesn't seem to be a point in leveling anything else. The damage you can do with normal attacks is fine and your companion is capable of outputting high enough damage that just going pure bulk to take more hits seems to be the only good thing to do with level ups. I could level up for more badge points, but it just seems pointless. FP isn't an issue either because with how bulky Mario is with leveling nothing but HP, I can just spam the Star Power thing to restore my FP constantly and let my companion do all of the damage.

Elden Ring: Nightreign (PC)

I finally did it. Depth 5 in Deep of the Night has been reached. I don't know if I'm going to attempt to go for 9999/9999 points, because just one loss in D5 is going to send me back down to about halfway through D4. At the very least, I'll probably take a break from the game for a couple of days to decide if I want to risk it or if I'm okay just calling it here, having achieved getting to D5, and moving on from Nightreign for the most part.

Pokemon HeartGold

So I ended up realizing my Eevee is male, so I can't evolve it into Espeon. So the new plan is to level Eevee up to 29 to learn Bite, then breed it to get a female Eevee with Bite, and then evolve that into Espeon. Gonna delay my advancement through the game by a lot, but it must be done.

Paper Mario

Most of the way through the Dry Dry Ruins (a very boring dungeon, I must add). Upgraded Kooper (so far the best companion to use, in my opinion) and Goombario (just because I have to 'scan' every enemy because it's just how I am, so having him upgraded is useful). Nothing much more to add than that. Game is still just kind of okay to me.

[Moonface]

Pathogenic (PC)
Oh my god I finally did that 28 minutes or less challenge. It took so many attempts I was doubting what build would actually be good enough to comfortably pull this off, but I managed to get a ridiculously powerful lightning build going that was letting me melt rooms in seconds even at the Heart. I actually managed to get the run done in 21 minutes but it would've been quicker if not for the time I have to spend finding the boss room for each floor.

[Mr EliteL]

I played TTYD before PM64, so it was a step back really from what you can do in the second game. Unfortunately it only has the normal guard, and it's too easy to lose your partner for a while so yeah you're tanking a lot of damage. You might be doing something similar to what I'll suggest; level up HP in 10 increments, then the next two level ups can be for FP/BP. 50-60HP can be a good point to get more FP/BP levels, then HP if you really need it, once you get HP Plus that can act like a HP level up, and can take that off for something else like switching to the FP Plus or another move. I played PM64 once and can't remember what my stats were like at the end. My Wii is packed away but would be interesting for me to check what my build ended up as.

Genshin Impact

Stopped playing in August for the month, which invoked the returning player rewards. I am still playing now, mainly on my two accounts on my laptop, a lot less on PS5, but did open up Snezhnaya and been clearing Spiral Abyss and Theater on that. I mainly played to get my Yae Miko to C1 as that is a huge buff for her, so I can use mine in my secondary EU account for Theater. I tried to get Odette on my PS5 but lost, so guaranteed for anyone now, at 40-odd Pity and a decent amount of Primogems gathered from some events, endgame and the return.

I got Odette and her weapon, Vodyanista and lost to Vesna's weapon on my F2P EU account, plus a free Varesa. On my NA I got Vesna and a free Chiori. Played through the main story on those two accounts.

Wuthering Waves

Been confidently clearing things in Wuwa as I got a bunch of new characters, but not the most recent 'big' character most people wanted (Hsin). I did lose 50/50 3 times though making me have a guarantee for a different new character. I have an all-round account really, slightly lacking Electro though.

Zenless Zone Zero

So glad I have Lighter as I would've been less interested in playing this, even though more and better Stunners keep releasing. He's my favourite for a reason, and have been able to slot him into one of my best teams Sigrid(or Ellen)/Lighter/Astra, have a great Ye Shunguang team and the new triple Anomaly team, but still missing Miyabi who hasn't run for ages annoyingly. So with those three teams I'm able to do Shiyu Defense and Deadly Assault, finally getting a 9-star for DA, all gathered from F2P pulls too. I did however decide to buy some skins.

Also a new mode was released which can be used to get the weekly rewards, where you're going to maps joined together of the local hub areas, but they're all alternate versions of them that now have multiple enemies. You're there to extract items and important ones too for the mode's story whilst being hunted by a disturbed hollow creature. I haven't got to the end to be able to properly face the creature in a final battle yet, but can defend against or evade the creature when it's trying to hunt me.