What are you playing at the moment?

[BillButNotBen]

There’s also loads of Wuxia movies, though I am no longer remotely up to date on them and I have no idea which ones are based on the specific 3 kingdoms stuff.
I guess they’re in the same ballpark at least.

[Det.Bullock]

I’m currently trying to figure out the fourth hub in Hexen: Beyond Heretic (PC) mostly by running in circles through the levels while staring at the map hoping to see if there is a switch I haven’t pressed or a wall that I haven’t looked at yet.
I’ve read of people that got stuck at the first hub already but the first three are downright straightforward compared to this.

[Similar]

I went back to 7 Days to Die. On lowest difficulty and I’ve turned the seventh day hordes off, so I’m just puttering around, looting stuff, trading (with the NPC traders) and building a bit.
Never played without the hordes before, but it’s quite nice to not have to run around getting a base ready every seven days. It might get a bit too comfy in the long run, but if so I can always tun the hordes back on again.

It’s fairly relaxing, at least until a zombie sneaks up on you while you’re chopping down a tree and makes your heart jump out of your chest (and some days have very ominous weather, which makes me so nervous I don’t go out much then, even though there isn’t much there’s a real threat to me anymore).

[sonson]

Thank you so much for all this and for taking the time to write it all out so legibly. Hopefully in happier less fraught times I’ll have the opportunity to pursue a project like this.

[Naramsin]

I’m re-playing Mass Effect 2, I think at this moment it is my fifth playthrough of this game.

Also played and finished Family on itch.io, it’s free and really good if you like this “who done it” puzzels, except is about finding out who was who in fictional London 80ties indie rock scene.

[Baines]

There’s also loads of Wuxia movies, though I am no longer remotely up to date on them and I have no idea which ones are based on the specific 3 kingdoms stuff.

Movies don’t have the run time to cover more than a small period. Like you, I’m having trouble thinking of any.

Red Cliff, directed by John Woo, is a classic. While it covers only the battle of Red Cliff (aka Chi Bi), it is a major battle that includes several major figures. The down side for casual interest is that the original release is nearly 5 hours, while even the heavily abridged original international release is 2.5 hours.

I don’t recommend The Lost Bladesman, starring Donnie Yen. The event it covers is too small, Guan Yu leaving Cao Cao’s service to return to Liu Bei. More importantly, I just found it to be a boring movie, spending too much time on a lot of nothing, with surprisingly dull action scenes and an even duller “forbidden romance” plot.

I haven’t seen Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon (starring Andy Lau), but it is supposed to cover the life of Zhao Ziling (aka Zhao Yun). Zhao Yun is an important figure in the latter half of Three Kingdoms, living through the rise and fall of Shu, so this could potentially be a decent intro?

I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head.

EDIT: On a somewhat related note, there is one major thing to realize when trying to get into Three Kingdoms, different sources can use different names for the same person. The first part of this comes from China’s courtesy/style name system, where you can get a completely different name after you become an adult. For example, Zhuge Liang’s courtesy name is Kongming, and anything you watch, read, or play will likely only use one of the two. The second part comes from romanization and pronunciation issues. For example, the Chinese Pinyin “c” apparently has a completely different pronunciation than the English “c”, which is how “Cao Cao” and “T’sao T’sao” are the same name. (Assuming what you are watching/reading/playing isn’t using his courtesy name, Mengde, instead.)

[icemann]

Today, finished off the Fallout - The Frontier fan singleplayer expansion mod for Fallout New Vegas. Overall this was damn fine stuff. Often matching the quality level of Obsidian’s own stuff in New Vegas proper. Not all of it mind, as there were several spots that could use some fine tuning. Quests that abruptly ended, or went in directions without a clue given to you as to why. But for the vast majority of it I was extremely impressed with it. Voice acting was top notch as well.

For the record, I sided with the Crusaders as I’m a Brotherhood of Steel member for life (as of playing Fallout’s 1 & 2 + Tactics), so was a no brainer. Plus I’m not big on NCR and definitely not the Legion. Love that practically every monster was completely new (mostly), and of the huge amount of quests + the size of Portland, and of the frozen setting.

Was a couple of locations that I came across that were really extensive, monster filled, but I found no quests in relation to them at any point. Maybe a NCR or Legion specific quest place maybe. I found the Crusader stuff really fun with their Knights of the Round table aesthetic. Considering there is an enemy faction in Roman armour + the leader of Caesar, having one setup around the Knights wasn’t a stretch at all. Made sense if anything. I played through the uncut version of it, as I wanted to play the most complete experience of it. I 110% get and respect why all those people requested to have their work taken out, but the mod was already out. If it was a proper proper Fallout game, all of that content would never have been taken out. Though in a legit game, there would have been legal docs signed pre-development concerning content etc.

In either case, The Frontier just as with New California (another singleplayer fan expansion for New Vegas, which came out early last year) will be part of any future New Vegas play through that I do. Now back to the Mojave for vanilla New Vegas content. Had most of it done prior to starting up the Frontier, so shouldn’t be more than a few days of play left.

Negatives - Quite a lot of crashes happened whilst playing through it. Many of the music included was not video streaming friendly. Every video of my gameplay that I’ve uploaded to Youtube has had copyright claims put on it. Not happy Jan.

Final battle could have been done more grander. New California’s final mission was all out war, with hordes of Mutants vs NCR troops complete with vertibird’s flying in etc. Frontier ended in skirmishes. Good, but not on the epic scale that New California ended on.

If you don’t mind the spoilers, New California ended on this one, which is the most impressive battle I’ve seen in Fallout New Vegas:

Compared to this in the Frontier (jump to 30:00 in the video)::

Neutral - They didn’t put a companion cap in it. So you can literally have a death squad accompanying you around by about mid-mod onward. With that and the vastly superior weapons in the mod = very easy battles even on max difficulty mode. Energy Sniper rifle and the Jericho Fusion Cannon once acquired made short work of nearly anything I pointed them at. Jericho fusion cannon in particular was awesome to watch it’s ridiculous levels of destruction capable from even singular shots from it.

Having a large squad accompanying me around everywhere led to some awesome random battles of 20+ enemies vs my 5 party member (not including myself) of destruction.

Favourite part - Would be when I was out exploring a subway tunnel and found myself in an abandoned research base filled with Wendigo’s (think of them as like super tough ghouls, that take a considerable amount of shots to go down). It felt like I’d stepped into the movie “The Return of the Living Dead”, as even with my then 3 party members it was the hardest location that I came across, and really long. Good location.

[looper]

…utterly ruined Hillary Mantel for me, by pointing out that, despite the brilliance of a lot of her work, she has basically only one “voice” for most of her characters, i.e. they essentially all converse and some extent think the same way (this isn’t just about word choice, but the underlying mental approach, personalities and so on), and once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. A decent percentage of authors have this problem, and once I notice it, I’m fucked because I can’t stop noticing it.

Interesting! I’m not sure of this is something I care about enough to notice. I suspect I don’t notice this and instead just care what voice the author has (through his/her characters).

I don’t read a ton of fiction…I’m kind’ve selective. Just out of curiousity, do you like Jeff Vandermeer? Love his work. I think he reminds me a tiny bit of Kafka, who I also love.

I enjoyed a few Philip K Dick novels, twenty years ago…

Just throwing these out there, to see if any of these are authors you’ve loved or hated because of or despite the problem you mention.

[Det.Bullock]

I have beaten the final boss in Hexen’s main episode.
At that point it was just a matter of keeping distance and using the Bloodscourge because I had plenty of ammo and he didn’t have any force barrier that bounced back its projectiles unlike this guy in the screenshot:

I have just started the expansion Deathkings of The Dark Citadel, there was a level with four wyverns and I got already a Bloodscourge piece which means this will probably get as ridiculous as Heretic’s expansion episodes.
Thankfully I’m not the kind of player that starts games on higher difficulties.

[LexW]

I definitely haven’t noticed it with Vandermeer - his characters often have very different ways of thinking about things and expressing themselves (not merely different opinions, but different mental approaches). I haven’t read enough Philip K Dick as an adult to say. One author who definitely doesn’t have the issue is James Ellroy, despite writing in a heavy period style full of jargon, slang and so on, with a fairly heavy prose style too. Some characters are just totally alien to each other - this is most obvious in his multi-PoV books like Perfidia. Initially I found Kay Lake’s voice pretty off-putting but she becomes a great counterpoint to the self-serving puritan-sleaze of Bill Parker, and the paranoia, self-hate and skittishness of Hideo Ashida, or the drug-addled egomaniac half-reality Dudley Smith inhabits.

Oh Tom Clancy, never a great writer, is someone who did have the problem badly. Whilst his characters often have wildly opposing goals and ideologies and varied accents, the way they think, fundamentally, about how the world is and what works and so on, is always basically the same, and characters tend to speak similarly too (barring accents). This is why he’s so weak at writing terrorists (despite loving to do it), he can only do sort of crude fanaticism, or calculating evil, and the latter is basically identical to how his good guys think, just bent to evil.

It’s worth noting that I both try to avoid noticing it, and tend to abandon books where I do.

Anyway if I say more it should probably in the book thread - it’s accidentally rarely a problem in games for two reasons:

1. Most games don’t have enough dialogue/story that it would likely become obvious in the first place.

2. Most games that do have a lot of dialogue/story have several writers, all of whom have different voices, and who think about voice a lot more than some authors because they have to work with other writers, and if two or more people write a character, it’s important that the voice is consistent so it gets discussed.

I’ve been playing Total War Warhammer 2 mostly, tried to get into Three Kingdoms but I couldn’t decide who to play as.

[Sarfrin]

I finished Observation. Absolutely bloody brilliant. The story it told was an actual proper good story with an ending that sent shivers down my spine. The puzzles were just challenging enough to make you feel like you were actually doing something without slowing the narrative down and the way you interacted with things as an AI worked perfectly with the game’s UI. There’s a moment when you’re given an instruction for what to do next and it just stops you cold. I didn’t realise this was made by the people who made Stories Untold, but it makes sense because the stories in that game were beautifully told as well. Best story driven game I’ve played in a very long time.

[Det.Bullock]

Hexen: Deathkings of The Dark Citadel
Boy the second hub was just ridiculous, endless respawning of high tier enemies and a hidden switch that I had to google because it was in a passage that was incredibly counterintuitive to open, how in the hell was I supposed to know I had to destroy a bunch of mummified corpses to open a hidden door? And this was mandatory, to compensate I have found a secret level by accident and I didn’t go through it only because at that point I was tired of the endless onslaught of respawning monsters and I got all the pieces of the last weapon already.

[BillButNotBen]

Had a go on Micro Mages, which is a retro NES style 2d platformer that even comes with a NES rom.

As such, I stuck it on my Nintendo Wii and loaded it up in RetroArch. Up to 4 players have to guide their micro mages up a tower and keep ahead of the ever rising bottom of the screen.

This turned out to be the best thing ever according to my kids, who spent the entire time laughing, giggling, shouting at each other and largely falling to many many humorous deaths.
I’d tried it single player on my PC the night before and it was fine, but I think it’s the kind of game that shines in hectic multiplayer. Well worth a look if you have someone to play with.

I think the one genius mechanic is that if one player dies, they become a ghost who can fly around the screen and freeze enemies, meaning they can help out the remaining players. If the other players can stay live long enough to get to a chest then they have a chance to get resurrected (though that seems a bit random and I’m still not quite sure on the specifics). The great thing about this is that even in death the kids get to keep having fun.

PS/ it was in The Bundle™ so you may already have it.

[Hanimalle]

The surprise release of Nebuchadnezzar today has me itching to try it because I have a soft spot for Impressions type games. Given that I’ve never heard of it before however, it might be wise to wait for the reviews before I make a purchase.

I’ve started my first game of Civilization VI, playing as Cleopatra ruling Egypt, it’s been pretty engaging so far, I like the way it looks, even if it is just a bit more cartoony than I would expect from a Civ game. The whole district thing does shake things up a fair bit, especially since you can no longer build everything in a single city, you have to make choices which makes things more interesting imho. The soundtrack is really good too but that’s not surprising for these games.

[Sarfrin]

After a tweet by Dominic Tarason, late of this parish, I downloaded The Dark Mod. I’ve played the training mission and the other two missions that come included with the download. Although it’s technically not Thief for legal reasons it’s stuffed with sweet, old school Thiefy goodness. There’s nothing like crouching in the dark holding your breath as a guard walks by inches away then standing up and bashing him in the noggin as soon as he’s past. Being able to snuff out candles is pretty good too. Apparently you couldn’t do that until the last proper Thief game. There’s even a bit of voice acting with a passable Garret impression in Tears of St Lucia. Looking forward to exploring a few more missions.

[icemann]

Finished off my play through of New Vegas (which included the fan made singleplayer expansions - Autumn Leaves, New California and the Frontier). Started that at the start of COVID lockdown last year (March) and been chipping away at it over time since then. Fantastic game, buggy as hell but I just love it. Even more so with all the added content. I could have gone all out and added in the Tale of Two Wastlelands which combines New Vegas with Fallout 3, but that wouldn’t have worked with the fan mods.

So with that done moved onto inFamous on the PS3 via emulation. Been waiting for this game to run good in emulators for years. I played on my actual PS3 10 years ago and loved it. It wasn’t until I upgraded my PC roughly a month ago that it then started running decent in RPCS3. So onto that now.

Damn fun playing this again. Love the karma system of making light or dark choices and it having knock on effects to how the people perceive you and what powers you gain access to.

[LexW]

Wow inFamous. A game that felt like you were actually in a super-edgy post-Image revolution comic from 2002 or something. I was personally very conflicted by it. I enjoyed the gameplay a lot, and the visual style and presentation of a city was strong for the era, but oh god the EDGY PLOT man oh boy. I could practically smell the Axe/Lynx body spray and see the bad facial hair of the people who’d be buying/writing that comic lol. Rarely has a game made me go “Wow really, seriously, that’s what you’re going with?” so much, and most of the moral choices were hysterically black/white, making the most “obvious” RPG choices seem like real nailbiters. Some of them are pretty much “Help some civilians get some food” OR “MURDER EVERYONE RRAAAAAR MURDER!” and it’s like uhhhh that’s not really “choice and consequences” lol. But then some of the “dark side” powers were pretty great…

But I will never claim it wasn’t a fun game. It was. It was fun enough that I finished it even, which was somewhat unusual.

[icemann]

I remember being of a similar mind on it. Story was half half. It has an interesting but very comic book styled final boss and ending where the end boss is you from the a parallel universe future, and a particular illusion of choice section where no matter which person you choose to save it results in the same outcome. Hated that, but the game is top notch and the powers on offer were great. That’s the appeal 100%. Due to gameplay - Yes. Story - No.

Would like to check out the sequel later on as well. Never played any of the later entries.

Running around the city freeing up areas from gang control is fun. Really like the underground TV hack thing, with the guy talking about what’s going on behind the scenes. Had a very “eyes only” (from the Dark Angel TV show) style there. Unique game overall.

[ToomuchFluffy]

Well, against expectations I actually managed to finish a run of Dawn of Magic’s second difficulty. I can’t really say that it was always fun considering the constant health bloat and some of the strange idiosnycracies of the game. Like that one helmet I enchanted with one of the few rune words I ever have managed to get together. Just +1 to all attributes isn’t even all that good, but for some reason the game decided to catapult the strength requirement for the item up to 17. Considering how hard to come by attribute points are in DoM and how slow advancement was at this point, there was no chance that I would ever be able to use it again.

Other than things just being very slow because of how tough monsters are and because of how much kiting everything requires, Act V also has some rather confined map entry areas. Those resulted in a few deaths and Modo - the last boss - led to a few more. I think the range of my main spell is a bit shorter than the range of the various projectile spells I would usually employ against him. Which is problematic considering how easy it is to get caught in his stream of projectiles and to possibly get stunlocked. So - after a few deaths - I eventually just started hiding behind buildings, waiting for opportunities to apply my damage-over-time spell. Thankfully he doesn’t have much health regen, otherwise this would have ended up being very frustrating.

Not sure yet if I ever want to attempt the third difficulty, but I guess I’ll see.

---

Other than that I have been putting time into various other games, so I haven’t been making much headway in general. Some hours of Vietcong, Auralux: Constellations and of course Tides of Numenera. I still do quite like it, but I somehow always seem to end up just playing one hour per session or so.

[icemann]

Further into inFamous:

This is really fun stuff. Once it opens up to side quests and gaining some of the better powers is when things get really good. Some level of choice in how to deal with things.