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I am moving forward, with Star Ocean 5 on Galaxy difficulty. I am in chapter 10, and I got again access to fast travel. Which makes the game much more fun again. I am trying to create some new items by synthesis, which I have never made before and slowly filling up the list of items, enemies and battle trophies to fulfill the prerequisites for some trophies. I am missing a lot, and I will definitelly need one more playthrough on Chaos difficulty, so I am not wasting to much time with the stuff As I said, I am again having much more fun with the game, and looking forward to finishing it. Mainly because I completely forgot most of the plot after 7 years

Finished Lies of P. It's alright. Really impressive considering how new the studio is. I quite enjoyed it at first, though it overstayed it's welcome for me. Gameplay wise it felt like a mix of Dark Souls and Sekiro to me (I know Bloodborne is a commonly used reference, but I am still waiting for the PC port). Mostly Dark Souls, expept it relies heavily on perfect parries a lot - something I wasn't a fan of, as P felt quite sluggish to control, and enemies relied heavily on the annying long windup+immediate strike attacks, that are rather impossible to read, and require precise memorization. If there is another way one can play I didn't find it - at least as motivity builds (aka strength) bosses rarely have enough time for a safe strike. So it's been parry, parry, parry, until they stagger, and that try to squeeze heavy attack for a critical. As as far as I can tell that's a strategy for every difficult enemy in the game became rather boring. I ended up using Spectre's help (summonable NPC helper for most bosses) for couple of last bosses as I just couldn't be asked to repeat the dance. Spectre turn out stronger than I expected - both good at tanking, and dishing out damage, usually turning ball busting bosses into pushovers. Alas, I had to suffer through the last boss without an assistance.

Just got back home after a week in New Orleans. Quirky to go to an American city where you can casually walk pretty much everywhere. Had the fun of landing back on Saturday, and then being told that around 150 pieces of baggage had been left at Heathrow. So I had to do the adventure of hit Walmark for basic necessities and some spare clothes while waiting on my particular baggage to catch up to me. Survived the Vampire Speakeasy.

Shadow Tactics. Failed a mission by causing a time paradox. Overall, the variety of characters, locations, and ways to complete missions are good. Aiko's playstyle somehow reminded of Assassin's Creed 1, though Altair still carried weapons openly while using his monk disguise (walking slowly).

I would describe the stealth mechanics in Hitman games as serviceable. I treat Hitman games as puzzle games. I have to figure out how to do a silent assassin run and once I have that figured out, if I'm feeling froggy, I try for the ultimate, the suit only, silent assassin run. Some people enjoy having to improvise and fight their way out of a plan gone sideways. That's not my jam, but it's a completely valid way to enjoy Hitman games.

I cleaned up my large base. It's 99% for looks/fun of building ... the npc pilots still visit. You can go multi-story with the room modules but the auto-mount a ladder when you get close to them mechanic drives me nuts - and you must put those ladders in the center of the claustrophobic rooms - so I don't do that and instead "game the system" to spread a base over more territory then initially allowed. I have a few pets but I forget about them since they're auto-put away every time you get in/out of your ship. Plus per usual, they're just deco or the silly riding. Or you can try to breed new ones re:colors/size/shape I think. Some are cute tho. The brown one on the right tries to track/find POI's for me but isn't very good at it. Not all worlds are grassy biospheres. There's a non-organic lifeform in the below pic - in the game it's obvious because it's rolling around like a boulder. Pretty cool. This planet matched my ship pretty well I thought.

While Eidos Montreal Deus Ex's reboot/prequels are quite decent, I meant the OG 2000 Deus Ex. You know you, but what stealth games did you try? Honestly, I think most stealth games aren't just done very well. I really like stealth, but there is a handful of games I would actually recommend (Thief1&2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Invisible Inc. Mark of the Ninja, Mimimi's output. Also hitmans but I don't think stealth as a game mechanic is their strong suit).

I'm giving BG3 another go. Having trouble sticking with a main character class. I feel like you are kind of forced into having shadowheart around unless your MC can heal. She's my second least favorite companion so far... behind only Gale, who might be the most annoying video game character since claptrap from borderlands. Might just start over and leave him in that portal. From playing the first 45 minutes like 8 times I notice a lot of the interactions make you think your class matters but you get the same [class] dialogue option in all the conversations so far... it just changes what class it says before the dialogue.

Started playing some CoD Modern Warfare Remake. Damn did this game not age well. Graphics are fine, but the gameplay is so dull and boring. It's just one shooting corridor after another, and you have to progress asap or enemies will keep spawning. Crazy that this was the top of gaming back in the days. Also funny, if you don't aim down sights, your bullets will go all over the place, heh.

The main problem with that reasoning is that you can always apply it in reverse. If you're going to blame Gazan civilians and make it all their fault then you can also blame Israeli civilians and make it all their fault too- even more so since the Israelis voted in their religious whackjobs, repeatedly. Half of Gaza's population wasn't even alive last time they got a vote. And of course it's completely irrelevant as a defence against war crimes. You can't remove protected status from civilians because they won't fight your war for you.

Maybe the battleships are only moved there to stop the people from fleeing via boats.

Its funny you mention " what Stealth games have I played " because I was talking more about how I generally avoid the stealth option in RPG, so I dont really have any proper Stealth dedicated expose to say that with examples And I did play one of the older Hitman, 1 or2, and I finished it. But I think its because I generally dont use the stealth options in RPG unless I am forced to or with games like Far Cry and AC where it really makes sense to clear certain enemy camps

Did the new ending, was worth it to tell Johnny off.

Ok, I've put in about 200 hrs of No Man's Sky now, although I still have not finished the story line although I have progressed it farther. The TLDR would be: The game as it currently is in 2023, is a fun sandbox, but gameplay value - especially if not on a sale - is going to mostly appeal to a certain type of player. Even if you are the type of player it would appeal to, over a lengthy interval it might start to feel a bit shallow vs. some other more concise/specialized sandboxy games. Overall for sandbox genre I'd give NMS something like ... 6.5/10. Maybe 7/10 at most. Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying the game quite a lot, and it's great for mindless chill, exploring, self-goals/long semi-mindless mental distraction. The level of freedom is great. But outside of freedom to explore/look at quintrillions of procedural generated planets, everything else - bases, pets, settlements/fleets, all of that, feel more at an afterthought level. Probably a consequence of trying to please those who wanted more than system/planet exploration, but still make everything in the game not required. ------------------------------- Re: Questing ---The quest side of the game for me is maybe a 3/10 at best. The quests are extremely repetitive - not surprising or anything - and generally consist of perform scans on planet or check galaxy map for markers, go to a new system, land on a planet, find/click something, repeat endlessly, pattern. All the main and larger side quests I've done still feel like tutorials, with rewards mostly being access to new structure/crafting blueprints or maybe some tech mods and maybe making you build/use the new thing as part of the quest. So if you've already bought/upgraded a lot on your own, they are an especially pointless/annoying grind. ---being someone not hugely into strong narrative arc games, I'm often fairly tolerant of shallow quest systems as long as they're short/quick. My tolerance for the ones in NMS is really low. One or two of them, so far, have made me want to turn the game off for the session, in annoyance/boredom. They are more dull - and at times, RNG-irritating - than killing 30 rats in the basement. Just me tho. ---if one is the type who wants to finish the story, I would recommend brand new players to follow it almost exclusively. Save the sandbox or side lore hunting, if you like the game enough, for after. At least then they wouldn't feel as pointless as putting them off until later. ---there are a lot of nitpicky UI, controls, npc menu, inventory menu complaints I could make but eh.

Next demo, The Talos Principle 2. It starts out looking like The Talos Principle. Not the worst thing in the world since The Talos Principle is one of my favorite games and IMHO the best game Croteam ever developed. But then... But also Greek gods? This game looks STUNNING. There are some wall textures I've found that look a bit gnarly if you try to lick them, but overall it looks spectacular. It's out in less than a month too. /rubs hands together

Shadow Tactics. A stealth tactical game in the Edo (?)/Japanese setting. Played a few missions, really nice in all aspects for the genre (e.g. no story choices or character customisation), except the lack of pausing.

@majestic Our sarma look like this: (My mouth started to water when I was looking for pictures I kid you not) On the topic of induction cooktops I got this one It has 4 zones that you can combine, but if you want real freedom and have countertop space and money to burn you can get this: With this one you can put the cooking pot anywhere you want and it will find it and heat it. The biggest drawback with induction is that you can not remove or shake your pot/pan otherwise it will turn off, but the positives are POWER and really good temperature control that you cannot get with any other type of cooking.