Ok Hades.  I almost quit last night.  I'd made it to Hades four times with the shield but never really got close to beating his second phase.  I'd unlocked every sort of upgrade I could see other than sinking all my titan blood into the weapons (which didn't seem worth it) and wasn't seeing any way forward where getting stronger was a possibility.  And I knew I wasn't going to get better at the game before my patience was just completely gone.

But then I remembered the God Mode tip and hot dang, I wish I had turned it on about 15 attempts ago.  I made it out on the first try (attempt #38, wow).  Now I've unlocked the Heat system and there's so much potential for grinding for materials to improve my weapons (at least I think that's the point).  So that's cool, I just wish I would have gotten here around attempt 15-20 as I really don't think I care enough to keep going.  I'll do a few runs to see if I'm right about how it all works and to unlock a few more Persephone chats but eh, I think I'm about to call this one "beat" and move on.

Posted by: @theknightdamien

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So I've put a good many hours into Dragon's Dogma 2 on Friday and over the weekend. It's good, with some caveats.
The BIG one is Capcom being absolute cunts by making it so you not only cannot create multiple characters, you also can't create a new game. EVER. Once you start up with your character, you are apparently locked in forever. There's NO new game option. You can't start over. And that seems purpose built to sell you on using REAL money to change your character's appearance (since there's only one other in-game way to do that and you WILL NOT be able to do it until you're at least a few hours into the game, as it requires in-game currency and access to a certain NPC).

That is, without a doubt, some of the bullshitest bullshit that ever bullshitted.

Add in that, like with Elden Ring, you cannot have multiple saves so you can go back if you don't like your choices. You have two saves. Your current auto/hard save, and your SUPER hard 'I slept at an Inn' save. That's it. So if you mess something up (and I did - totally by accident), you're fucked. You get to enjoy that or, maybe, go back 10 hours to the last time you were at an inn and lose all that progress.

As a positive and negative at the same time; the game feels a little like Elden Ring in the sense that it doesn't like to tell you things. There's definitely -more- hand-holding than Elden Ring has, by a LOT. But also like.. way less than in most RPGs I've ever played. That does make the world feel more interesting and more open to exploration and discovery. But it can also get frustrating when you just want to get something done.

The pawn system is both interesting and problematic/stupid. The in-universe explanation of pawns is just.. so dumb. And there's some other things, like vocations, that are handled 100% "in character" in the world and I just... I don't know. I'm not really a fan of when games try to incorporate all of the actual gameplay mechanics into the world itself. Like I gotta go to an actual NPC in a city and 'register my vocation' to change from one to another? It's weird and actually pulls me -out- of the immersion a lot more than just an out-of-world menu would.

The pawns also talk WAY too fucking much, say the same goddamn things over and over, and can RUIN your entire game by going insane and killing everyone while you sleep. So that's cool, right? Finding decent pawns is also kind of a nightmare. You're relying on either Capcom-generated ones, or player-generated. Here's the issue:

Capcom Pawns are shit. I don't know why. I'm not sure if it's my bad luck, or an intentional choice to push you toward the online elements of engaging with other players. But the couple of times I used Capcom-created pawns, they were absolute fucking trash. Like tanks that don't tank, mages that don't heal sort of trash.

Player-generated Pawns are also shit, but for a different reason. I just find that out of all the ones that appear in the Rift, there's usually maybe one that I can tolerate using. Granted, I do like to take games like this fairly seriously. This isn't Borderlands where I expect goofy craziness. So no, I don't want to use pawns that look fucking ridiculous, or have idiotic names. For a game that seems steeped in immersion, I can't see how anyone didn't think this would be a problem for maintaining that immersion. It's a minor complaint because there are a lot of pawns and you can exit and re-enter the rift to load new pawn choices as many times as you want, as far as I can tell. Still, meh. I'd rather be allowed to create my own new pawns every 4-5 levels.

The Brine is just John Marston Can't Swim on steroids. But I guess.. good for them in coming up with an in-universe reason why your character never learns how to swim?

I'm complaining a lot, but let me also say something; this game is fantastic and, if it weren't for bullshit like the lack of multiple save slots and ability to make multiple characters, might land on my top 20 of all time list. It's a LOT of fun, even with the frustrations. I love how the game encourages you -very- strongly to try out different vocations, and how easy it is to do so. I always go Fighter or whatever the sword-and-shield guy is in a game. But I probably spent 9 hours playing as an Archer because it was required for a quest and I just stuck it out for other quests as well because I was having a lot of fun. I started the Thief vocation yesterday and that's pretty fun too (although I don't like it as much as some people seem to). I don't think I've ever seen a game before that encourages you this much to play different classes while making it easy and fun to actually do that.

I'm not sure how invested I really am in the story, which might prove a problem in another 10-20 hours because I don't see there being too much more variety of enemies than what I've already seen. We shall see, though.

Last night before I shut it down, I got into a crazy fight with a Griffon and this thing FLEW THE FUCK AWAY with me on it. Luckily, when it finally landed, my whole group sort of appeared. So I not only killed a griffon, but I got all the extra loot from its nest. That was cool. Very cool. The negative side is that I was currently on a mission requiring you to escort an NPC. I have no idea where that NPC disappeared to or if I've now auto-failed that quest, which sucks.

And that's something that is also both good and bad; it feels like an abnormal amount of quests are 'okay, let's go!' as soon as you agree. You tell an NPC you'll help them and you need to help them now or they'll run off on their own or disappear. You've also gotta watch and make sure none of the quests you grabbed are timed (there's an hourglass beside those ones in the menu).

Anyway... really long post. Sorry guys. It's a really good game - even an amazing game - with some really serious flaws and intentional bullshit decisions that are hampering it. But I'm glad I bought it and I'm still naively, desperately, hoping they put out an update that adds new game/multi-save options. But to be clear, I paid 100 dollars for this fucking game (Canadian) and anyone at Capcom that thinks I'm going to give them any more real money for basic quality of life features that should be in the game is out of their goddamn mind.

I played the first Dragon's Dogma when they announced the second one. I had a very similar experience to what you're describing. It has the best monster battles this side of Monster Hunter. That's not a surprise, given the shared developer/publisher. The world exploration is also very good. That said, a combination of poor quality of life, a lack of engagement with the story, and a lack of handholding stopped me from buying the second one.

Fast travel, quick saves, encumbrance, and weapon durability are the four horsemen of quality of life for me. Any game that violates two or more is an almost definite pass for me. FromSoft games do the same shit with save files and it drives me insane. Save scumming probably isn't the right way to play games, but I paid for the game and should be able to play how I want. Funny enough, a friend of mine who bought the game experienced the same issue. He lost more than 10 hours of gameplay due to a quest error and couldn't go back to a more recent save. It's almost like these problems are entirely predictable, especially in massive open-world RPGs.

While games are willing to beat players over the head with tutorials (largely because gamers don't always notice what's clearly being indicated), games that under-explain are just as bad. I generally don't vibe with JRPGs because they introduce too many clunky systems and menus. Dragon's Dogma isn't quite that, but I did find myself scratching my head more often than I like.

Posted by: @mikeysee

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Ok Hades.  I almost quit last night.  I'd made it to Hades four times with the shield but never really got close to beating his second phase.  I'd unlocked every sort of upgrade I could see other than sinking all my titan blood into the weapons (which didn't seem worth it) and wasn't seeing any way forward where getting stronger was a possibility.  And I knew I wasn't going to get better at the game before my patience was just completely gone.

But then I remembered the God Mode tip and hot dang, I wish I had turned it on about 15 attempts ago.  I made it out on the first try (attempt #38, wow).  Now I've unlocked the Heat system and there's so much potential for grinding for materials to improve my weapons (at least I think that's the point).  So that's cool, I just wish I would have gotten here around attempt 15-20 as I really don't think I care enough to keep going.  I'll do a few runs to see if I'm right about how it all works and to unlock a few more Persephone chats but eh, I think I'm about to call this one "beat" and move on.

Glad you were able to beat it! And you're right, most of the weapon upgrades don't make that much difference.

To get the "true" ending, you have to beat the game 10 times and talk to all of the gods another handful of times. It sounds like a lot, but with God Mode and a decent number of upgrades, it isn't too bad. You can beat the game on like 80% of your runs by that point.

@tsi See, you'd think I should be able to consistently beat it now with God Mode and lots of upgrades but nope!  I've tried four runs since besting Hades and have fallen to him every time.  I'll probably try a couple more because I really would like to see how the story plays out but I think I'm about ready to put this one to bed.  After beating Elden Ring I was feeling pretty good about my gamer "skillz" but I think I've come to terms with the fact that I'm just bad at this game!

@mikeysee I feel you. I consider myself largely a mediocre gamer. I can play most games on normal difficulty without much problem, I used to be really good at strategy shooters like the old Ghost Recons, I was fairly good at brawlers and 1v1 fighters back in my day, I've done okay at Elden Ring until the Haligtree. But I get absolutely schooled by games like Sekiro. So that's where my skill range is.
I only beat Hades one time. So I never got the 'true' ending. Now, it's fair to point out that I took a break from the game to play some other stuff and I just didn't have the patience to go back and kind of 'relearn' a bit to get good at it again. I'm sure you could power through it if you really wanted to. It's just a matter of whether you want to. I LOVED Hades. But, being totally honest, I was never invested enough in the actual story to care about getting the 'true' ending so... I didn't. I got my W and moved on and it still ranks as one of my favorite games.

@tsi I've seen a lot of favorable comparisons between DD2 and DD1, saying DD2 does what DD1 does, but way better. I can't speak to that, having not played the original. That being said, I don't think DD2 necessarily breaks your 4 cardinal rules.

There's no weapon durability.

There is fast travel, but it's just a bit more complicated. I've put a ludicrous amount of hours into this game now and I can say that fast travel is never easy in the traditional sense. You do need to think about it before you do it, because it costs resources to do - particularly if you want to travel somewhere that oxcarts don't go. BUT, there does seem to be a kind of method to this madness in that the fast travel gets a lot easier to manage later in the game. Retrospectively, it feels like they just were pushing hard for you to -play the map- before skipping the map, if that makes sense. I'm around level 45 now and for at least the last ten levels I've had Portcrystals set up in areas that don't normally have fast travel, and it's been reasonably trivial for me to keep enough Ferrystones in my inventory to pop a quick travel when I need to.
What I appreciate, even if I still think this isn't the best system, is that this does force me to actually play the game a bit more than I otherwise might. I've done cool stuff specifically because I didn't want to waste the 10k-value Ferrystone and the trek seemed short enough or safe enough that it wasn't imperative I fast travel. Totally a personal taste thing here, but I KNOW that I have a tendency to fast travel too much in games once it becomes too easy to do it. It's nice having someone put a little bit of a leash on me, even if it can be inconvenient.

The quick-saving is complicated. Again, I get it. I see why they want you to actually think about what you're doing by creating a system where there can be consequences you can't go back from (probably in part the original intention behind not having a New Game option - which is getting patched soon). You CAN quick-save. I do it all the time. The issue is that your auto-save and your quick-save are the same slot. So whatever happened last is what you're stuck with. Otherwise you can go back to your last Inn save (so an Inn or a House you own that you last rested at). So how far back your last save was just depends on your play style and what you've been up to.
Again, it's absolutely not my preferred system. But frankly, it's about 10,000 times more forgiving of a system than Elden Ring, so I find it hard to be too down on it.

Encumbrance is another sticky one. It exists, but also like.. I've barely had any issues from it. My character is normal size and male, while my main pawn is normal size and female. I.E. We don't have the stats to automatically have crazy high carrying capacity. But between the two of us, it's very rare that I need to drop anything because I'm over-encumbered. Keeping in mind I actually like to stay at the 'light' end rather than 'average.' Be even easier if I was okay with staying in the 'average' weight range (or if I'd made my character, my pawn, or both larger). I just like having that little bit of extra stamina to utilize by staying light.
Add in the other two pawns you'll have, as long as you're careful with what you give them, and again - I've honestly had zero issues with encumbrance for 99% of my playthrough. The only two times it got tough were in fairly long dungeon/cave, and on my way to the second main hub city in the game because the trek to get there between areas you can dump your extra gear is VERY long. There's Inns in pretty much every village, and you can own homes in the two big cities -- all of which give you access to your storage. And you don't need to keep crafting materials on you. They can be used from your storage. So you're only ever really needing to carry your weapon, your armor, maybe a few spellbooks, and some healing/stamina consumables.

So it's definitely a system I'd say mostly exists just to make the game world not feel absolutely ridiculous. It's almost never an actual hindrance. But like other systems in the game, it's -enough- of an issue that you do want to pay attention to it. Which can help you actually stay organized. Not saying it's never a negative. Just that it's not something I think actively hurts the experience like it does in other games.

One other comparison with Elden Ring is the quest/activity system, when talking about the lack of handholding. Major quests have indicators on the map AND you can always find pawns that have done the quest before and will literally show you the way to the next objective. It's basically impossible to get lost or not know what to do next. So for important/major stuff, there's actually a fair bit of handholding if you -want- it. But DD2 also does the Elden Ring activity thing where people will just like... say things to you. It doesn't become an official quest in your quest log. You just have to figure out what you're supposed to do. And again, that's something Elden Ring was -praised- for doing, so I get why that's part of the game. I admit that I don't love it.
At the very least, I wish there was a logbook of all this stuff, even if they don't specifically plop a quest marker on your map. Half the time I can't even remember what people said to me between play times, so I can boot up and have absolutely no idea what I had been intending to do.

Oh, and the game is actually pretty easy once you get past like level.. 20 maybe. I'm sure it depends on your build and how much story vs. side questing you're doing. I definitely think some people might be more comfortable running just 2 pawns, or even just their main pawn only, to add a bit more challenge to some encounters. But I don't need a game to beat me over the nuts with difficulty for it to be fun. So, I'll close with that. I'm genuinely having a LOAD of fun playing this game. I get a mix of Elden Ring and Dragon Age from it, and that's been cool to experience. I'd put this in my top twenty or thirty games I've ever played, easily. To be fair to my gaming style, though, like half of that list is BioWare.

@theknightdamien Yeah, my pointed comment was making specific digs at the fast travel and save systems. I don't think the save system was so rigid in DD1, but fast travel was still a pain in the ass. I could probably come up with better cardinal rules if I put some thought into it, but I haven't in the week since I made that comment. Honestly, on top of my experience with DD1 and the DD2 complaints I heard from my friend, I was pulling the last major flaws to annoy me in games (weapon durability in Zelda and encumbrance in Starfield). A fifth complaint I just came up with is also Starfield-adjacent. It's the copy/paste elements to fill a map or add playtime to a game. A good example is the Temples from Starfield. They were anticlimactic, tedious, and repeated 20 times to pad the game length. Ubisoft and other devs are guilty of this with bandit camps and the like.

I know Dragon's Dogma 2 is a better game than that, but I also feel less inclined to play/watch/read things that aren't exactly for me anymore. It's been liberating.

You have a point about the fast travel system forcing you to explore areas you wouldn't otherwise. The trouble is, most games don't reward you with random encounters or interesting dungeons along the way. It becomes an exercise in redundancy, and you're left feeling like you wasted your time. That said, some of the best gaming memories I've ever had were literally just walking across Cyrodiil in Oblivion or patrolling the Mojave in Fallout: New Vegas. I don't experience those things anymore because 1) game developers have taught me it's a waste of time, and 2) I'm mainlining the story content because I know they put time and resources into those elements. It's a bummer all around. As I've said before, it'll be interesting to see how mega-games like GTA, Elder Scrolls, etc. operate as games become more expensive to develop. I think people responded so well to Baldur's Gate 3 in part because it made time and space for those moments of wonder and exploration.

Ugh. Even talking about this reminds me of another Starfield thing that pissed me off. The one time I did go off the beaten path, I wound up in a procedurally generated pirate base on a barren planet. I shot my way through the area, discovering logs about a MacGuffin along the way. I scoured the base three or four times and never found the MacGuffin, so it either didn't exist, was bugged, or was too well hidden (unlikely). I said "never again" and powered my way through the rest of the story.

Another another Starfield thing that pissed me off was when I realized the game had me operating like a robot. The main quests either weren't clear or didn't do enough to keep me engaged, so I was fast-traveling to the objective location, running/shooting my way to the marker, and then fast-traveling out. There was no deeper thought about the mission story. It was full-on TSI Zombie Mode. I'm doing my best not to play things that make me feel/act like that.

I've been playing a bit of Civilization VI. I once joked that I would never pick up a Civ game because I'd become hopelessly addicted, quit my job, and wind up homeless within six months. Thankfully, that hasn't been the case at all. I think there's a better version of this game that could've hooked me, but it isn't the one they released.

My only experience with Civilization or any turned-based strategy came a few years ago. I played a few games of Civ VI with friends, which was a different experience. We played co-op against the AI and had a decent amount of fun with it. On my own, it's been a different story. I played one 500-turn, full-length game and was immediately frustrated with it.

The worst bit is the lack of flexibility. Every turn, you can advance one civic achievement and one technological invention. For instance, it may take 40 turns to unlock drama and poetry or 60 turns to unlock electricity. Some of these can be fast-tracked by meeting a goal like killing a specific enemy type or building a factory. That's all well and fine. My bigger issue is that most advancements have a prerequisite, and the prerequisite doesn't always make sense. I agree that you shouldn't be able to invent chemistry without the scientific theory. No argument here. But why is rifling a prerequisite for steel? You're telling me if a society doesn't invent rifles, they'll never have steel? The civics and technology trees are littered with examples like that, and it ultimately locks you into the same trajectory every game. You can't go straight science because the game forces you into military technology first. Like Cities Skylines, no matter how many times you play the game, you're ultimately on the same course every time.

My second issue is that if you lose the early game, there's no way to recover. I wound up sharing a continent with Matthias Corvinus/Hungary. (If I ever see that motherfucker, it's on sight.) Early game, he would not stop invading me. This put me on the back foot, always defending my cities instead of investing in science, trade, etc. I would've counter-invaded, but his military was far stronger than mine. By the end of the game, I had built an impressive university system and trade hub, but I still finished dead-ass last.

Finally, military alliances are useless. Even though Hungary derailed my game from the start, I formed strong alliances with the other three AI-controlled players. Unforunately, you wouldn't have known it from watching my game. Although we were all in a joint war against Hungary, I never saw a single military unit engage the Hungarian military.

When a 500-turn game runs 20-25 hours, these problems are game-breaking. I don't think I'm done with Civ VI, but when I do play again, I'm going to be very intentional about the game length, difficulty, and map setup. The leader that won my game was stationed in Australia, far from Matthias Corvinus' bullshit. Next time I play, it will either be on island plates (small island countries only) or Pangaea. If I have to deal with Matthias Corvinus, everyone else will, too.

@tsi I've been playing Civ since the early '90s and one of the reasons I haven't gone out of my way to keep up with the series is exactly what you're talking about. I get really worked up over the wonky tech trees. Yeah, makes total sense that my empire hasn't figured out Philosophy yet. How could they? They haven't even discovered the Three Field Crop Rotation system yet, which is absolutely tied directly to early Philosophical Thought.

LOVE strategy games like Civ and its ilk, but they definitely make me rate shriek from time to time over silly stuff that doesn't seem, not being a game developer myself, to make any sense.

Regarding Dragon's Dogma; I want to clarify and say that there's lots of valid reasons to not like the game. -I- like it. That definitely doesn't mean anyone else will. And it's definitely the kind of game where I think you get the least out of it, and perhaps have the most frustrating experience, if you're trying to just stick with the main story and play the primary content. I feel like, in a very small way, it's like RDR2 in that regard. A lot of the complaints about how that game plays seem to come from people that just want to play the main story and experience it as a somewhat linear video game. That's totally fair. But definitely not the best way to play RDR2.

I keep and will keep making comparisons between DD2 and Elden Ring. I don't think DD2 is the better game by any stretch (although I find it more enjoyable on some level because I'm not dying 400 times to one boss). But DD2 does create that sense of 'figure it out yourself' or, more accurately 'wait for someone to figure it out and then read the guide online' that Elden Ring accomplished. I do like that there's a sense of exploration and that there's so many things to do that aren't necessarily part of the 'go to that location marked on your map' part of the game.

But that means in order to have fun with it, you need to want to play the game by just wandering around fighting monsters. It's not complex, and it's definitely not everyone's preferred way to play. As I said, I don't think DD2 really has much of a story to it - or at least the story isn't particularly interesting.

And God. FUCKING. Damn. am I tired of random pawns in the world running up to me with their fucking resumes out. Piss OFF.

One of my ideal changes to this system would be to allow you to create extra pawns and figure out a way to level them differently from your main pawn to encourage you to still swap out from time to time. Or maybe let you have 3 created pawns at all times, but pawns can actually die so if a pawn dies you have to go make a new one.
In fact, I kind of love that idea because the character creator system in this game is practically award-worthy and you BARELY interact with it. Getting to go back into it at several points throughout the game to imagine-up new companions actually sounds like a great way to utilize a system they clearly spent a lot of time developing.

I guess what I'm really saying is I hate other peoples' fucking characters and their stupid character names and their hideous designs and their bad ability choices. More frustrating is wanting a specific type of pawn and not being able to find one. Again, in part because you're relying on the choices other players have made for their main pawn and I just don't want a half-naked female mage that's 8 feet tall named 'BangMe' or whatever.

For the record, I also turn off ALL multiplayer elements of Elden Ring and if you couldn't do it, I probably wouldn't have played the game because of how fucking obnoxious I find it when there's 800 glowing messages on the ground that are all just as worthless and stupid as the next, and random people can literally interrupt my single player game to fuck my game up for me.
I don't understand the players that think that's fun. But thank fuck FromSoft realized some people would hate it and made it optional. Now if only they'd realize that difficulty settings are not just quality of life, but a matter of accessibility, and stop catering to GamurBoi fuckheads whose entire sense of self-worth is wrapped up in whether or not they're better than someone else at playing with a toy.

Moving on...

Buddy, I could write a fucking doctoral thesis on how much I hated Starfield. You're preaching to the choir with your complaints there. I literally quit the game before starting the final mission because I just flat out did not care. I definitely wasn't going to do a time loop bullshit final act that's going to try to encourage me to go into NG+ and play that absolutely atrocious pile of dogshit all over again. Starfield might be my worst game ever made. It's just empty. It's empty of gameplay. It's empty of creativity. It's empty of excitement. It's empty of game DEVELOPMENT. It's just a space skin on an already extremely dated engine, without a single new thought put into it over any other game they've ever released on that same system.

I've never felt like a game was so intentionally wasting my time as I did with Starfield, and that's doing a lot of the same thing you were doing; just bouncing around between objective markers because I realized any level of exploration is completely fucking pointless.

At least, with games like Elden Ring or DD2, there may not always be tons to find by exploring, but what you do find was put there on purpose. It was meant to be found and enjoyed. They wanted you to see it. It isn't there because the game's algorythm had to keep generating stuff for you to find.

I think Morrowind was the best I've played as far as having a hand-crafted world that rewarded exploration.  I might have mentioned this before in this thread, but I'll never forget the wonder of stumbling upon a sunken shrine or randomly finding a one-of-a-kind Daedric helmet high up on a ledge in a cave after using a Levitation spell.  That world felt intentional and rewarding.  I think I've kind of been chasing that same vibe ever since playing it back in 2003.  I loved Skyrim (and to a lesser extent Oblivion) but the Bethesda Formula was really starting to show by that point.  Elden Ring came close but it's just such a different game it doesn't hit quite the same way.

To that point, I've been thinking of picking up Outward.  It's apparently pretty old school (as well as punishing) and very love-it-or-hate-it.  From what I've seen I think I'd enjoy it though the lack of experience when you kill enemies is a definite negative for me.  Old-school also means it's lacking in some quality of life improvements such as fast travel, but I never used that in Morrowind because I wanted to explore and find as many POI as possible.  So yeah, I think I'll probably try that in the next few months.

Right now I'm playing Bear and Breakfast... yeah, a very different game after months of Elden Ring followed by Hades.  I love me some cozy gameplay but this one is just ok.  It's getting too stressful now that I've unlocked the need for heat and food in my establishments and I'm just ready for the credits to roll.  I think I'm getting close thankfully.

After that will probably be Celeste.  I've heard nothing but good things about it and I found it for cheap at GS this past weekend so it's probably time to give it a shot.  After that... I've been kind of jonesing for a JRPG oddly enough.  I used to be all about them but lost interest when the entire genre became spiky hair, big eyes, and belt buckles (basically around the PS2 era).  There are some solid ones on the Switch though so I might give Xenoblade, Ys VIII or Octopath Traveler a try. 

Elder Scrolls Online has their 10 year anniversary so they had a trial all this month you can play for free

I think I may continue playing it, the standard game only costs $4.99 on sale now

free trial only lasted a week

Oblivion is my version of Morrowind. I've been chasing that high for 18 years now. The closest I've come to replacing it is Skyrim, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, and Fallout: New Vegas (which I only played a few years back).

Celeste is wonderful. I'm not good at platformers, though, and needed cheats to beat it.

I've been playing Balatro religiously over the last few weeks. Steam promoted the game earlier this year through their "next big thing" event and the demo blew up. It's deservedly sold more than a million copies since then. It's a poker-based, deck-building rogue-lite. It sounds complicated, but it's devilishly simple. The idea is you play through eight antes. Each ante has a small blind, a big blind, and a boss. You have three hands (sometimes more, sometimes less) to accumulate the score needed to beat the blind/boss. You're dealt eight cards and must make the best five-card hand possible. The hands go by regular poker rules, so you want to create straights, full houses, etc. You also get a few discards per round, which allow you to swap cards in your hand for a random draw. It forces you to be strategic about which hands you try to build when. The twist happens between each round when you can use your winnings to upgrade your deck or buy jokers. The jokers are where the fun comes in. They can modify your cards, the amount of money you receive, or the multiplier you get for each hand or card.

I'm not sure how good of job I'm doing selling it, but it fucking rocks. I beat the game several hours ago and I'm not going to stop playing anytime soon. That, to me, is the test of a great roguelike/rogue-lite.

In terms of 'chasing that feeling' I would say mine is Daggerfall. That was the first 'big' game, in terms of world design and options, that blew me away. But I think that's the problem right there; it never again feels like the first time, right? I've also never experienced a stealth or stealth-adjacent game like Metal Gear Solid 2. Because that was my first experience with that type of game, probably, rather than because that game is genre-definingly untouchable.

@tsi @theknightdamien Funny that you both mentioned Elder Scrolls games for the same reason.  Makes you wish they'd return to their roots a bit and inject some passion into their projects (though I did love Skyrim).  Give Morrowind a play if you haven't already.  The beginning can be frustrating as all hell because all of your attacks are driven by hidden dice rolls.  With low skill you'll be missing like crazy and you can die pretty easily to the lowliest of enemies as you just stand there swinging away and never connecting.

I finished Bear & Breakfast on Friday.  It was a pretty fun little management sim game but it overstayed its welcome for me.  The ending of the "story" was a freaking slog, you do about 15 fetch quests in a row that basically just required you to travel from A to B.  It also introduces some story beats waaaay late in the game so you have almost no time to process them enough to care.  Then the game just... ends.  I don't think there were even credits.  I actually looked online to see if that was actually the ending and found plenty of other people asking the same thing.  Yep, that was it.  It was clearly tacked-on because someone involved thought that just making a quirky management sim game wasn't enough.  Maybe they were right but the story was so poorly developed and written that it kind of sank the whole thing.  Anyway, on to greener pastures, like...

Celeste!  Daaaaang.  I was not sure how I'd do with this one as I don't tend to love "hard-as-nails" games because my gaming time is usually fairly limited, but I freaking loved this game.  I didn't expect there to be such a puzzle element to the platforming, that really helped keep me interested, and then the restart after dying was so snappy it really didn't wear on me much until the very end.  And the story.  I'm not going to say it was perfect as I was a little disappointed by the end, but it really nailed the emotional highs.  I loved that the gameplay mirrored the story: you have to just keep pushing forward and believe in yourself, as cheesy as that sounds.  I don't know how many times I ran into a challenge that I thought was going to make me want to quit but every time I'd gradually chip away at it, finishing the first part, then the second, then finally nailing the whole run to get to the next screen.  It is an extremely rewarding game.  I "finished" it yesterday with something like 40 strawberries and 2016 deaths, 8:45ish play time.  Probably pretty poor compared to all the young'ns that play these games but I'm proud of myself for beating it.  I only got really frustrated once and it was at the verrrry end, at like flag 9 as you approach the summit.  There's a part where you have to jump vertically between a one-wide gap in some thorns three times in a row.  I couldn't get past the third one.  I probably died 100 times just on that one section. Ugh.

I was a bit disappointed when I learned that the credits weren't actually the end of the story though.  I didn't get a single crystal heart on my play-through and even though I loved the game I wasn't about to jump right back in and dig for FOUR of them so I could experience Chapter 8.  I like that there's reason to play it more but I wish story wasn't locked behind what is essentially a challenge mode.  The replayability is crazy high though, so that's cool.  B-side levels, the strawberries, the hearts, the gems, apparently a crazy hard Chapter 9, C-sides... wow.  I'm sure I'll play the game again sometime and try to really dig in and find all the things.  Just not now.

I was riding high after that victory so I decided to try another indie darling, Hollow Knight.  I only got to play for a couple hours but so far I'm mixed.  The style is great and I'm already seeing a few things I love such as currency to buy upgrades and the collectables that add upgrades to your character.  But after I beat the first boss I meandered in the direction of where I thought I should go and ended up playing for about an hour without finding a checkpoint or map.  I beat a couple mini-bosses and then died to the Hornet.  I revived waaaay back in the starting area without my ~900 money and absolutely zero idea how to get back to my body since I never found a map.  So that's not fun. 

@mikeysee I did play Morrowind - I'm just not really a big fan. Now, it's also fair to point out I'm not a fan of Skyrim and that seems to be bordering on blasphemy. It's funny that you say they need to go back to their roots because I think it's kind of the opposite; they never grew from their roots. They're still releasing the same game every so often with slightly better (but still below industry standard) graphics. They haven't fixed anything. They haven't improved. They haven't innovated. It's the same game, with the same problems, over and over again. Oh, and now we also have the same game.. but in SPAAAAAAAAAACE. Fuck, it's even the same goddamn game engine that barely works.

I praise Daggerfall not necessarily because it was a great game, but because it was my first experience playing a game -like that-. It's embedded in my gaming DNA. At the time it was unique (for me). But now I'm older, wiser, and they've continued to make that game over and over again. So the charm it had, the impact it had, can't really just keep carrying over to the next installment. If they want to create that feeling again, they need to do the exact opposite of 'their roots.' In my opinion, of course.

@theknightdamien Yeah, I guess what I meant was it would be great if they'd make another game that showed clear passion as the driving force behind it, not sales numbers.  Maybe "return to their roots" was a bad way of phrasing that as I don't even know what their roots were, Morrowind was my first taste of Bethesda and I know a lot of people view it as a huge step backward when compared to Daggerfall. It's probably inevitable that these big developers have evolved into a shadow of what made them great in the first place.  When I was growing up Blizzard was my freaking jam.  Between Diablo 1/2, Starcraft, and Warcraft 1/2 they could do no wrong as far as I was concerned.  You could tell those games were crafted by people that wanted to play them, not developed by shareholders looking to make as many millions as possible.  Now... well, "Blizzard" might be one of the dirtiest words in the industry.

I'm rambling.  Don't tell anyone but I like video games more than action figures.  I could talk about this shit all day.

@mikeysee I get'cha. I was probably being a bit of a pedantic jerk there. Yeah, it would be good to see these types of games approached with passion again. I think that's why I like stuff like Elden Ring and Dragon's Dogma 2. For whatever faults they definitely have - they feel like games made and released and controlled by people that actually want to make a video game and have a clear idea of what that game should be. Bethesda, these days, very much feels like a company that isn't interested in making video games so much as they are a company interested in exploiting their existing capabilities to make as much money as possible - and that capability just happens to be 'making what technically qualifies as a video game.'

Maybe that seems like a small difference, but to me it's huge.

I should add that I'm totally fine with game developers using a proven framework that people genuinely enjoy. Like, I don't expect the next GTA game to be -markedly- different from the last. Just.. improved. I accept that from Rockstar. They're not, from one game to the next, necessarily making huge leaps or massive fundamental changes in game design. But they're actively tweaking what they do to make the best 'Rockstar-type game' that they can. I appreciate that.
Bethesda wouldn't need to re-invent the wheel to impress me. But they would need to actually put in some effort and respond to the many legitimate complaints about their last four or five games. Instead, I bet the next game is exactly like the last game, only with slightly better (but still not actually next gen) graphics.