What are you playing right now?

[Sharecrow]

I've been playing Assassin's Creed: Mirage. And Etrian Odyssey on my Steam Deck. Also putting in quite a bit of time into Tales of Arise. That's most of what I'm playing right now.

All three have grabbed me which makes it hard to pick which to pick up at a given time. I did start Wizardry: The Five Ordeals but damn it's tough. I have trouble keeping anyone in my party alive through a single fight LOL. Good times...good times...

Gosh I haven't gotten a platinum all year...not concerned about it though with everything I've got going on. That and my propensity to play enormous games and spend most of my time goofing off rather than getting trophies LOL.

[Sharecrow]

I'm down to a few different games now. Mostly I've been playing the FFV PR and Beach Buggy Racing. Occasionally am working on my jester run of DQIII and on Circle of the Moon (trying to get all cards...what a beating!)

My kids and I have been playing Beach Buggy Racing off-and-on for literally eight years. Am working on getting the last two trophies - one for km driven and one for coins earned. It'll be another month or so but it's going to happen finally.

[Niahak]

I've mostly been playing older games.

Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence seems to be one of the better regarded NA games, and I can see why. There's a kind of purity to it that echoes Romance of the Three Kingdoms 9, although you can step in to manually control combat and the town building is more interesting. At the same time, it makes it much harder (money and time wise) to hire rival disloyal officers and adds a (slightly) railroad-y historical event system. Officers being a little harder to come by is a good change, but they're also a little less useful overall - finding things for more than a few officers to do in a given castle/fortress can be tricky, there are no "free actions" such as searching and only one officer can improve town stats per month. Sphere of Influence is on the easy side which is fine by me - it's a very slow-running game (I had conquered perhaps 1/6 of Japan in a ~10h campaign) so I've largely dropped it. The Sengoku setting is fun, but I don't have the attachment to it I do to Three Kingdoms. Although weird oddity about this one - they flipped the typical Japanese naming pattern to "Given Surname", so "Oda Nobunaga" becomes "Nobunaga Oda".

Stardew Valley's 1.6 update came out a couple months ago, and I was planning to pick it back up whenever the Switch version came out - well, when I got a Steam Deck the "replay Stardew Valley" calculus changed - and I found a cool mod that adds some simple supply-and-demand mechanics to make growing/refining decisions more interesting that I wouldn't have been able to use on Switch anyway. So I'm most of the way through Summer.

Destiny of an Emperor is my favorite NES game, but I hadn't replayed it in probably a decade. Steam Deck seemed like a good time to fix that. After a brief crack at one of the earlier DOAE mods, I ended up switching back to the original as DOAE 2.0 was too hard for me. The pacing is just about perfect IMO - while it's not a hard game, it nails some of the "battle of attrition" feel older RPGs do - where you're trying to progress in the overworld or dungeons while saving enough MP / HP to make it to the boss. I may not continue past where I'm at, but I've only just recruited Lu Bu and my strategist is powder master Huo Hu.

Ember Knights is a roguelite cooperative (1-4 p) game that is just about perfect for my daughter and I to play. She's actually better at surviving than I am. It's most similar to Hades - a dodge-fest with several weapon options, relatively light on passive power-ups between runs while gradually unlocking new skill/relic types. The art/story is not nearly on the same level, but neither is the difficulty so it's a little more my speed. Over the weekend we had some friends over and got to the 4th world and unlocked the final weapon type although I understand there's a whole weapon upgrade mechanic we've yet to unlock.

[Niahak]

Nearly a month later, I've dropped most of last month's games and picked up some new ones.

Ember Knights is still in the running as we "beat" it once, but it appears to do a "pick difficulty upgrade" challenge. We're still unlocking relics, upgrading weapons and skills etc so I'm hoping we continue to play it. Pretty good game at the $4 I paid for it!

Stardew Valley has progressed to the 2nd year - I have a greenhouse, most animal types, gotten to the skull cavern (which seems super dangerous) and I think it's as far as I've gotten in my combined 70 hours of Stardew. Progress is feeling a bit slow so it's kind of on pause at the moment.

Slay the Spire has been interesting to try. I'm pretty late to the game, and might be one of the few finally convinced to play it by trying the board game with friends. I've successfully slain the spire once (Defect) and am trying out the final character. I will probably drop it given D:OS2 is pretty gripping.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 isn't the first Divinity game I played, but I didn't play the DD games or D:OS 1 (I've only played Dragon Commander). I think I'm supposed to be a bit lost in this world of carnivorous elves, weird forbidden magic and lots of choices. But it's been fun so far! I escaped a prison fortress, discovered in an (extra) arrest I'd been disarmed, had to load an old save, found a whole other area I hadn't explored, and I've been making bad choices about companions (I'm 98% sure there aren't any good ones to make). The controller-based controls have taken a bit of getting used to.

[Kong Wen]

Slay the Spire has been interesting to try. I'm pretty late to the game, and might be one of the few finally convinced to play it by trying the board game with friends. I've successfully slain the spire once (Defect) and am trying out the final character. I will probably drop it given D:OS2 is pretty gripping.

I did a couple runs through Slay the Spire and then I kind of fell off the routine of trying a run per night when I moved my PS5 from the family room to my studio. I did keep it installed, though, which is a good sign that I didn't lose interest in it. I suppose it would be a good one to play on the Portal while lying on the couch. I'll get back to it!

I am really bad at strategizing in these kinds of games, though.

[Niahak]

I am really bad at strategizing in these kinds of games, though.

It's really tough, and the best strategy can fall prey to the luck of the draw. You have to hedge your bets a bit early on, and the difference between a great run and an early loss can be finding the right card/relic to unlock a strategy you've already made baby steps towards. I'm not good at deckbuilding games myself (tend to spread myself too wide, which clutters things later on), so I'm in the same boat.

I've also been playing Luck Be a Landlord for mobile off-and-on for months, and it's like speedrunning the roguelike/roguelite formula, where you have to pick the symbols on your slot machine and different symbols and items synergize in different (sometimes weird) ways. It has the same push-and-pull where you might get a relic that builds on your strategy or one that does nothing for it, which can really tank a run... but at least it's more like 5 minutes than 50, so it's a little easier to justify in my brain.

[Sharecrow]

I've knocked out a few games I've been playing off-and-on for years so have found myself spending time with some shooters lately. I haven't played much Visage for pre-October gaming (I keep thinking - I can do it later...I can do it later....LOL).

Hyper-5 on PS4 - this is a pretty fun if a bit corny shooter on PS4. I'm up to level 4 (out of I think just 5). It's getting tough but the game has some neat features that encourage replaying levels through level select, time attacks, an armory where you can upgrade tons of stuff about your ship using points accumulated during playing, an arcade mode, and challenges for each level.

Image Fight (arcade version) - Image fight is one of several games on volume 1 of the Irem Collection. I was stuck on level 3 for months but, to be clear, wasn't playing it too much during that period of time. The boss to level 3 is bananas. Not literally but sheesh it's tough staying alive in the same screen with it. I finally pulled it off though so now, on a good play through, I can get to level 4 (out of I think 8). I like the game a lot...the premise is you're fighting in a simulation so each level you get loaded in and have to fight your way through.

Final Fantasy VI PR - I've been savoring FFVI. I'm pretty sure it'll be my favorite of the first six games in the series. Wow they did well on this one. They're all good, but this one is a masterpiece. Anyway, I'm not too far in it, but am slowly (and carefully) chipping away at it and enjoying every minute of it.

Lastly, I do play the rogue shooter Steredenn as well as TMNT Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants with my son sometimes. Steredenn we have a ton of hours in and can get to the second-to-last level boss pretty reliably. Tough game though. TMNT we have just done a couple of levels so far, but it's on my radar. I prefer Leonardo and my son usually plays as Donatello.

[Niahak]

I didn't think I would do this, but I kind of dropped Divinity: Original Sin 2.

I think the main reason I lost interest was that I felt like my characters were really unoptimized, but then when I re-configured them a bit they could no longer use their skills, and getting skillbooks is kind of an ordeal on its own (hunting down characters that have them, then trading for the books, then using them with the right character which is easy to do wrong) and so I ended up with marginally optimized characters that were missing useful skills... and then a really hard combat where I was

Spoiler

defending a lady demon/person on a boat

and half my characters died although I made it through... and then another story section where I'm drip-fed little bits of plot with still no really "big picture".

I think what I'm trying to say is that it's mechanically more micromanagey than I'd like, but it also does little to keep me interested in the story. I enjoyed what I played, but once I dropped it for a few to play Slay the Spire for a little bit longer I didn't really feel compelled to dive back in. Maybe I'll pick it up again someday.

Meanwhile I decided to go for UFO 50 while it still had a launch discount and I'm glad I did. It's a great retro-styled indie game collection, masquerading as a pretend company's roughly-NES-era game catalogue. I've played ~20 of the games, I think? And they're mostly pretty fun. My favorite so far is Avianos which is kind of a grand-strategy (turn-based map style, like the old ROTKs) with some modern board game-style mechanics (for example, each turn you pick a deity that offers different turn action options). And auto-playing combat (kind of reminds me of, uh, I think Castles 2 but it's been literal decades so I might be mis-remembering). I accidentally wrote several paragraphs trying to explain the game elsewhere. It manages to be complex with such a small game size - it's really impressive. Lots of games in the collection are like that - while on the face of it they're a simple action or adventure game, they have a lot of cleverness or modern ideas hidden underneath the hood. Like, Mortol looks like it's a platforming action game, and only offers three actions aside from running and jumping... but there's a lot of wiggle room in those actions and they're integrated really cleverly in the level design - the focus of the game being optimizing those actions, which all sacrifice a life. Definitely recommend checking UFO 50 out.

I think some games are simply not going to be up my alley (for example an Uninvited-like horror adventure), but there's plenty here that I want to dig deeper into already and I'm going "chronologically" - so I've started with the less refined or complex titles.

[Kong Wen]

Meanwhile I decided to go for UFO 50 while it still had a launch discount and I'm glad I did. It's a great retro-styled indie game collection, masquerading as a pretend company's roughly-NES-era game catalogue. I've played ~20 of the games, I think? And they're mostly pretty fun. My favorite so far is Avianos which is kind of a grand-strategy (turn-based map style, like the old ROTKs) with some modern board game-style mechanics (for example, each turn you pick a deity that offers different turn action options). And auto-playing combat (kind of reminds me of, uh, I think Castles 2 but it's been literal decades so I might be mis-remembering). I accidentally wrote several paragraphs trying to explain the game elsewhere. It manages to be complex with such a small game size - it's really impressive. Lots of games in the collection are like that - while on the face of it they're a simple action or adventure game, they have a lot of cleverness or modern ideas hidden underneath the hood. Like, Mortol looks like it's a platforming action game, and only offers three actions aside from running and jumping... but there's a lot of wiggle room in those actions and they're integrated really cleverly in the level design - the focus of the game being optimizing those actions, which all sacrifice a life. Definitely recommend checking UFO 50 out.

Interesting, good to know. I've had my eye on it for a while, mainly because it's developed by Derek Yu et al, but one of my main concerns with a compilation of so many minigames is that they would be too mini (not enough depth to stay interesting for too long). So I'm glad to hear that's not necessarily the case.

[Niahak]

Interesting, good to know. I've had my eye on it for a while, mainly because it's developed by Derek Yu et al, but one of my main concerns with a compilation of so many minigames is that they would be too mini (not enough depth to stay interesting for too long). So I'm glad to hear that's not necessarily the case.

All the games are conducive to a quick 10-minute jump-in followed by bail-out try at them, but it's most have depth beyond that so far. Some have more depth in mechanics but would be quick to finish if played well, others are story-heavy or exploration-heavy and I could see them taking hours. I think the only "dud" I'd consider a minigame so far is a racing game, which I got "gold" (finished but not completed) in ~10 minutes. The others I've skipped over look like they have a steep learning curve or are not that interesting to me, but I see how others would be hooked by them. (Though the first, Barbuta, is a real slog).

I don't think any of them stand out enough on their own to succeed independently so far though. I mean, I like Avianos a lot, but it took a while to hook me. But grouped together the whole package is definitely worth the $25.

Tangentially - "took a while to hook me" would apply to a lot of these games. There's a brief blurb, and basic controls, but no manuals (deliberate choice, I think, it's kind of got the feel of loose carts purchased on a whim at a pawn shop). For example the controls might be "A: sword, X: jump" but it doesn't tell you that you can double-tap to run etc. It's a lot of discovery early on especially with deeper games like Bug Hunt or Avianos.

Some games are clearly homages, others are their own thing or separate enough it's not clear (I think Golfaria is secretly inspired by Pinball Quest but I'm not sure I'll ever know for sure). But a lot of them have that NES-style "anything goes" attitude about them.