Tale

A game that's fun to play at install. And, if there is a leveling system, it doesn't require repetitive tasks.

Observer Do you like random screams? Do you like long hallways that either stretch as you go down them or slow you as you get near the end? Do you think making things twitchy is scary? Random flying objects or slamming doors? Lots of nonsense? Do you like intentional design that makes you wonder if your graphics card is dying? Do you think characters don't pause enough between random words in their dialogue? Do you think dialogue is overall too coherent? Do you like having every overplayed horror and sci-fi trope shot straight into your face like a TVtropes.com submachine gun before you even hit the two hour mark? You'll love this one.

More Shantae! Beat Pirate's Curse, a fun little game, part Metroidvania. Beat Half-Genie Hero, which felt like a smaller game, with the mazes being more straightforward, but still with lots of secrets encouraging (and requiring at times) you to replay them. I've even beat Pirate Queen's Quest, which is basically a rerun of the HGH maps, with some minor changes, to accomodate playing as Risky instead. On to Friends to the End. Which is supposedly all new maps to accomodate playing Shantae's friends. Edit: And it's the same levels again, just with a new story. That's getting disappointing.

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse. It's just fun and with charming characters, so I ended up putting everything else aside for it.

Unavowed | Shantae: Half-Genie Hero Ultimate Edition | The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav | Hunted: The Demon’s Forge™ Chains of Satinav I already own on GOG, but I simply loved it. I want to get Steam cards and background and show a bit more support.

Now I'm sold on buying it.

Runs XCOM 2 fine? I run XCOM 1 fine. 2 runs rough. Shadowrun runs great, too.

How is performance on Mechanicus? I'm worried my integrated graphics wouldn't be able to handle it. Or that it'd run like Xcom 2 did.

The level scaling in Fallout 3 kills the game for me so badly I can't even form an opinion on their world building. Ooh, let's go check out the... and I'm running into an albino radscorpion again.

Back to Icewind Dale. The Dragon's Eye is where this place starts to pick up quite a bit. Not a lot of junk loot, but each level is practically a different dungeon. Also helps that my party feels overpowered as heck. So I just cut through all the snakes and undead like a mail order sword through the fingers of a roomate at a college party where everyone's had way too much to drink and there's the cute girl there he's trying to impress.

Watching that earlier made me want to rush home and watch the film. I love original crew Star Trek films (with the obvious exception). I hate TNG crew films. But then I got home and started watching their other recent recommendation, Haunting of Hill House.

I played it on GOG. Got it free, but bought the expansion. All the other DLCs are skirmish maps. GOG seems to download DLC automatically like Steam. I know it confused me for a while at first, too.

Dungeons 2, beat the campaign onto the expansion. I like the undead army, but they've ramped the difficulty up a bit. Getting swarmed while being stuck at tier 1! Thankfully I just unlocked tier 2 and the game tends to not ramp up the enemies. Or at least it didn't. The expansion is breaking assumptions.

Dungeons 2, I've got the hang of it, it's fun. My previous critique is washed away. It's not two games tacked together, it's just an RTS with slightly non-intuitive base building. Since you can't select your units well inside a base. It's pretty neat. But it's also helped me remember how much I hate having to build up my base every since map.

I bought the Telltale Game collection in light of the ongoing delisting. This got me the last ones I didn't have, Minecraft season 2, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Strong Bad. Actually looking forward to Strong Bad.

I beat Return of the Obra Dinn. Ending wasn't as impactful as I thought it'd be, but the numerous reveals leading up to it were fantastic and left me in awe. Identified everyone though. Still two achievements locked, but those are probably for bad ends.

Geoff Keighley produces the VGAs. Not IGN.

Are IGN doing a game awards, too?

Delete this or we're coming for you next.

It's my least liked Metal Gear Solid game. People who are into open world stuff seem to like it. I play the series more for story, characters, and boss fights. It has a few good story beats, a dearth of good characters, and maybe a couple boss fights worth mentioning.

Automated scam calls are turning into an artform, I swear. I just got one that straddled the line between "almost sounds like a real person" and "isn't going to fool anyone other than those already dumb enough to fall for scams." Which is sort of like that sweet spot for scams, I imagine. There was just enough pause for a listener to respond to a message and then it talked about putting you on hold for a specialist. It's got that aggressive salesman tactic going on. But then it requires you to press a button to continue holding while promising you won't be holding long. This is to make sure that someone picked up and it's not just hitting some automated system. But it does so making the mark think someone will be right with them. I think I answer too many calls at work if I'm starting to appreciate scams for their subtle differences.

Return of the Obra Dinn Is it too late to change my vote for Game of the Year?

Steamworks integration is actually free when sold on other stores. That's one of the big features of Steam. Valve only takes a cut from sales through Steam. The limitation is you can't give Steam customers a worse deal.

Everyone knows Direct 2 Drive is the best storefront anyway. That's where I bought Neverwinter Nights 2 and Thief: Deadly Shadows.

It's kind of striking how different Icewind Dale is from Baldur's Gate while still coming across like they're the same. Part of that is coming to it so late and doing this after a complete Baldur's Gate series run. But I end up noticing things like the spells. The sounds are the same, but the graphics are so different. Curse is anti-Bless, Chant is more powerful and disables further spellcasting! Look at all these Druid spells!