I'm playing Elden Ring at the moment. I would call myself a semi-casual Souls player, I've only ever completed Dark Souls 2, but I played the others as well casualy starting with the original Demon Souls back around 2009ish. So far I am having a great time with Elden Ring, I've got about 16 hours played. Realistically with my limited gaming time (parenting takes up most of my free time), I likely won't get to finish Elden Ring's story, but we'll see. My biggest complaint is the PC performance, it doesn't run well and has a lot of stutters, but the game is good enough that I've been able to overlook this.
I'm playing Elden Ring quite a bit as well. It looked awful until I forced vsync off in the Nvidia Control Panel settings. Now I don't have massive tearing in the center of my screen and it runs pretty decently. I'm at around level 35 currently and am probably ready to challenge the second main boss. Previously I was fighting through the castle underleveled in the 20s, and I was getting 1 or 2 shotted by the heavy armor knights. The technical issues and limited options are pretty awful for such a major release, but the content of the game itself is superb as expected. I think it's one of FROM's best games, possibly their best game, but they need to bring in some better technical people. Imagine what some tutoring from a developer like Insomniac could do for them. I think they're going to have to improve the technical areas in the next game, and I can't help but be concerned with whatever they're going to attempt with a ray tracing update given the game doesn't run well currently without it.
Halo 4 in the MCC on Steam There's a noticeable dip in quality going from Bungie to 343. This just hasn't been as good so far as any of the Bungie produced Halo games. They got rid of dual wielding. I'm also not a fan of the bullet sponge alien robots or the crappy weapons they drop.
Control Clunky combat. Graphics look mediocre other than some ray tracing features, but it's also poorly optimized. Nonsensical story. Boring bullet sponge enemies. I can see why this game has been free or dirt cheap. It's meh. I think it mainly existed to be a raytracing demo.
I got it for a cheap shooter but haven't played it yet. It's based on the SCP Foundation which made it slightly interesting.
Some people say it gets better later on once you unlock more powers. Guess I’ll slog through it and see. It's using the same janky, stuttery, unoptimized game engine as Quantum Break. I really wish they would have just used something that actually runs well like Unreal or Source.
I tried out the intro sequences at the beginning of Hipster's Row on PC. It took close to 10 attempts to even get it to boot up the first time, and it still gives me error messages sometimes. It just doesn't seem to be very good. The writing is so corny and stale full of the quippy style of a bad Marvel movie but much worse. The characters look more like gaming journalists at Kotaku or Polygon than gangsters and would certainly not be anyone a criminal would take seriously. I think a bully from a 7th grade wrestling team would give these "gangsters" wedgies and stuff them into lockers. There is a paramilitary leader character that was so corny I had to take a break. There is a lot of political crap in the dialogue about anti-capitalist sentiment and truly lame "jokes" about waffles and a guy with a waffle tattoo I guess these soy milk-weaned activist writers really thought amongst themselves were brilliant and creative when they were peak cringe. The plot introduced at the beginning suggested they are becoming violent criminals in order to pay back their college loans. I'm not sure who the target audience for this was, but it certainly wasn't me. They may have outright killed the series with this "reboot."
Right now I'm playing "The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes". I'm a big fan of the interactive horror games and this one delivers for me despite being cheesy and predictable many times. I'm not gonna call this game fantastic or anything like that, it doesn't really do anything new, but it has pretty good graphics, good voice overs, bonus points for featuring Ashley Tisdale (if you know who that is) and can be quite scary at times. I think I'm about 50-60% done with this game and hoping that "The Quarry" which is a game made by the same devs I believe goes on sale soon as I'd like to play that next.
Assassins' Creed Valhalla I forgot I bought it. I don't really have an opinion yet but it seems okay. The Viking raid thing is interesting. In my first fight all my Vikings were stuck in sneak mode and just watched me get beat down by 10 bad guys.
G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout Game is full on crap. There is a decent nostalgia factor, but the game mostly feels like they pieced together crappy components from older games.
Death Stranding Director’s Cut It’s a weird game but I kind of like it. It’s basically a post apocalyptic logistics simulator.
It's pretty low stress most of the time, mostly just pressure from time and weather for your deliveries. Occasionally you'll need to sneak past the ghostly tar creatures. Music was pretty soothing, too.
At the moment, I'm playing FNF Online, which is a rhythm-based movement game. You can play without downloading anything in your web browser.
Downloaded Portal RTX and tried playing with my 5700XT. It failed to even make it to the load screen so I guess that's like -7 FPS.
Myself, Monsly and Chi managed to platinum Human Fall Flat last night, really not sure how with Monsly fucking everything up all the time but we did it all the same. Still not sure why we put up with him nearly 15 years later, we know he is a liability yet we still play, I consider it charity.
Sonic Frontiers and Sonic Generations Generations is a much better 3D Sonic game. My son prefers it. I'm not sure why they tried to make Sonic gloomy, dark, and edgy with Frontiers. Also I think the closed courses work much better for Sonic than it being open world.
Everything about Control was boring. Boring story. Boring gameplay. Boring setting. It felt like a chore to play. Remedy hasn't made a good game since Max Payne 2.
Agreed. They used to craft a compelling story to motivate you through clunky gameplay (Alan Wake), but by Quantum Break the stories went to shit too.