Guardians of the Galaxy So far I'm liking it. It's not crap. It's a story driven, on the rails, action adventure game. Combat is clunky but fun. Sound track is nice.
Right now I'm playing these games. Doom Eternal (PC) - man this game is really really hard, and you have to be in a certain mood to enjoy it, it's super fast paced, so not exactly a "relaxing" game by any means. But the soundtrack is awesome, and it feels awesome when you finally nail an encounter, a bit like Dark Souls in that respect. Resident Evil 7 (PS4 Pro) - this game is really creepy and I've had great difficulty in calming myself down to actually play it because I get too scared. I'm a few hours in now, so I feel a bit more brave than I did initially. I will say the graphics are really nice in this. Mass Effect 2 from Legendary Edition (Xbox Series X) - runs really well and I never played through Mass Effect 2 more than a few hours, so virtually everything is new to me here. I'm guessing about a quarter of the way through this game right now and hoping it doesn't end anytime soon. Mortal Kombat 11 Aftermath (PS4 Pro) - this is the expansion pack for MK11. So far the story seems interesting. It's like a budget MK movie, but the story is pretty decent for a fighting game.
Doom Eternal has a learning curve. It gets a little easier once you learn which weapons and tactics to use during the boss fights and mob encounters. And yeah definitely not relaxing. The final bosses are tough, especially the Icon of Sin. The icon is hard even with them giving you infinite ammo for the crucible. You are so swarmed with enemies and the Icon is so powerful it hardly even matters. I still beat it, but the boss fight dragged on for like 20 or 30 minutes for me. I ended up really liking it. I also liked how they connected the story to the old games from the 90s.
That reminded me RE Village is $21 on CDkeys: Probably won’t drop any further given it has won some GotY awards recently. I bought it.
Wizard of Legend. It’s a rogue-like with basically zero story and seems a little harder than Hades. Except with an exploit where you can load up on power ups before you jump in. Kind of a hidden easy mode. It’s a ton of fun. Lends itself to a variety of play styles. Unlike Hades, in which you went from room to room, you get a large level to play. Meaning you can kite mobs a bit or pull manageable groups. There are rooms that you must clear to proceed (if you walk in) sprinkled throughout. But it’s less “he’s in here, get him” and more “here he comes, get him”. I might just be into the genre, but it good.
Command and Conquer Red Alert Remastered It's been 20+ years since I played this originally. It has a lot more going on than the original CnC. You now have full-fledged naval and air combat. You can tell they were trying to compete with Warcraft 2 Tides of Darkness, which came out after the original CnC and had naval and air combat. The alt history storyline is more interesting than the storyline in the original game. The soundtrack is better. The sides are much more even. In the original game NOD was worthless in multiplayer and everyone would just play as GDI. But the Allies and Soviets are pretty evenly matched overall. The pathfinding is still awful, and with more going on it becomes even more of a problem. The pathfinding for the landing craft is particularly horrible. It's still a fun game though and I think it mostly holds up.
I saw you had some achievements on Steam, so I believe you're playing it on PC. Did you have any audio issues at all? I just bought the game yesterday and the audio is problematic for me, it has cutouts/crackles. It's the only game on my PC that has this problem. It's unfortunate because the audio options in the game are very well detailed with lots of settings.
The game froze up my pc on the first boot. Updated the video drivers and everything worked fine after that that. Don’t have any audio issues but I don’t think I’ve ever had audio issues in any game since switching to a external DAC. Maybe switch to your HDMI out put on your monitor if that’s an option and see if anything changes.
Is anyone interested in playing through It Takes Two in co-op on PC GamePass? I've seen bits of footage of it in various videos since it won some GotY awards, and I thought I might as well play through it given it's on GamePass. Looks very creative and fun and a decent change of pace. I've also recently been playing Final Fantasy VII Remake on PS5 following being given access to a free upgrade from the PS4 version included with PS+. I didn't realize how good this "Intergrade" upgrade was and remembered seeing a decent amount of negativity in comments about it. It turns out that chatter was nonsense. This version is stellar and appears to be absolutely locked at 60 fps in Performance Mode, the only mode that merits consideration outside of use in a photo mode. This PS5 upgrade is up there with some of the best first party updates and looks almost like it was made from the ground up for the new consoles rather than a port of a PS4 game. Much of the dialogue is of course over the top and cringey, which I tend to expect from a translation of a JRPG. Outside of that it has exceeded my expectations quite a bit. The spatial audio isn't anything special, but environmental detail, HDR, character models, soundtrack, and the sense of scale are excellent.
Unfortunately I can't offer to play with you, but me and my wife completed "It Takes Two" earlier in the summer and I can strongly recommend this game, it's a very special and memorable xperience.
Balloons TD 6. I’m wasting way too much time on this game but it’s really one of the best tower defense games around. Totally worth $3.
Red Alert Remastered They weren't playing with the difficulty in these old games. There's a two part mission for the Allies where the Russians launch nukes. There's a timer that carries over from one mission to the next. If you're not really fast about getting into the enemy command center, you won't have enough time to disable the nukes on the next mission. The nukes launch right in the middle of a huge battle too. In other words you can beat one mission and then fail the next because you didn't leave yourself enough time.
I've bought most of the Hitman content (meaning 1 through 3 played via the interface provided in Hitman III), which I have been playing for PS5. It's a pretty fantastic series, and it runs quite smooth and looks fantastic on PS5. I could also eventually play the PS4 version via PSVR given the PS4 version is also included. This is a really cool way to play all the games at once with a good frame rate and exceptional graphics.
I did exactly this back in mid 2021, I found out I had Hitman 1 through PS Plus, bought Hitman 3 for PS5 and then waited a bit for a sale on Hitman 2 Gold, and played through all of it in Hitman 3. It's genuinely impressive what they've done here, it felt like such a modern game, and I was blown away with how well it ran and how it looked on PS5. One of my most memorable gaming experiences if I'm honest, and a testament to how well that dev team has implemented this feature of letting you play the old games in the new game engine.
I ended up refunding GotG on Steam and bought it instead for Series X. Great game honestly. Some of the combat is repetitive, but the soundtrack and the story/dialog is great. I'm having a total blast with this game. I wish I didn't have problems with it on PC, but honestly it runs and looks great on Series X. I was a bit worried when some reviews mentioned the performance mode is running at 1080p, but it still looks really good and I've been playing it exclusively with the 60fps mode.
I've been playing a lot of Horizon Forbidden West, and it's one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen. I recorded a minute of just running around a little village at night, and you can see the astounding level of detail everywhere. I intentionally picked a tiny village where there was a side mission or two rather than one of the more formidable hubs of major activity to demonstrate how widespread this absurd level of detail is. Performance Mode runs at 1800p checkerboard and should also play with HDR if you have a compatible display, which shows a lot more detail and nuance from the light sources (look more like overexposed auras in SDR; not enough range to handle light sources or sunlit skies). The detail in random open world (huge in this game, by the way) areas blows away many indoor segments of very linear games intended to showcase greater detail given they're more on rails through corridors and tiny areas. Forbidden West is pretty much an upgrade over Zero Dawn in almost every way, particularly the extremely fast load times, melee combat, and exceptional advancement with motion capture cut scenes versus the old mechanical feeling Mass Effect style dialogue from Zero Dawn. I think I'm around 2/3 to 3/4 through the game at this point and would highly recommend it based on my experiences so far.