Games played last week 2025 May 5 to 11

Flipping a few games, and wanted to write about what I've been playing before I forget.
* KOTOR (2003)
I stopped playing Kotor, just got to Korriban.  The combat is so janky I couldn't take it.  It was forgivable at the time, even the many years after it was released that I first played it, but it doesn't hold up. The real-time pause seems to lose my queued commands and queue up things I don't want it to do when switching characters, almost every single time.  Even on one character when I queue up a bunch of sniper shots, and stay on her, she runs up to melee and gets spanked before starting to 'snipe' when I un-pause.  I can take control of her movement and get her to stop that, but then it loses all the queued attacks and I have to do it again.  It also won't queue anything until you do an attack, so at the start of a combat if I want to cast more than 1 buff I have to pause, choose an attack, clear the attack out of the queue and then I can start queuing.
I think I remember just giving up on that originally and letting the characters do whatever it was the game AI wants and just spamming the attack I want button on the main character, and keeping the game difficulty low enough that it didn't matter.  That just makes me feel like I'm not playing the game now though.
The RPG and exploration elements are still great though, and I only wish other games could be that good in those respects.  And really considering RPGs, most of them are pretty trash in the combat, really pretty much all the good ones.
* Star Wars - Bounty Hunter (2002)
(Thanks for the giveaway Spalls!) Kind of cool, looks better than I was expecting for it's age.  I immediately got stuck for some time trying to get out of the beginning area, I went over everything I could see at least 5 times.  I had to look up online to find there's a grate in the gutter you have to cut through, well I hadn't even found the grate.
I didn't like the 'scanning for bounty' as you still take fire while doing that and get hurt pretty badly.  I didn't do that much due to getting damaged too much, but missed most of the bounties due to that.
I got stuck again after getting a jetpack, I was supposed to follow my target, but he was already away before I could get the jetpack, and I went over every nook and cranny again, probably 5 times not finding another way to go.
I gave up on it at this point, as I felt if I was going to have to look up every few minutes to find where to go just to continue it was too much (I don't mind so much if it's secret areas, but for the main path that's a bit much.)
* Weapon of Choice (2015 indy contra-ish game, give-away)
Wow, this looks like it was drawn by a pre-teen with some colored markers.   Unlike a typical contra when you die you can play another character until you run out of characters. I got all the endings in exactly 60 minutes, so very short.  I wouldn't say it was 'good' but it was fun enough for that time.
* Balatro (2024 Indy poker card/rogue-lite)
I found this is on Apple Arcade, so I was able to play it for free.  My wife also gave me her old iPad a couple weeks ago, I'm not sure how well would do on a phone screen.  It's pretty good.  You do runs in it and unlocks stuff seeing how far you can get.  You don't really play against anyone, but have to beat a certain amount of money you get for playing up to 4 hands to continue, buying cards which affect how much each card/ winning hand is worth.  Pretty easy to understand.  I managed to 'beat' the game on my second run, but you can keep playing with increasing amounts you have to make after that and I immediately lost.
Yeah, you probably aren't going to like this if you don't know poker, or don't like card games.  I can see playing it on the phone if it's any good as a time killer while waiting at the doctor or whatever, but it's not really my bag, and don't have interest for playing it regularly.
* Dark Sector (2008 3rd person FPS)
I just started playing this, it was given away at some point.
Supposedly a predecessor to Warframe, which I loved (until it got grindy.)  This is single player offline though.  Wow it looks horrible compared to those SW games from 5 years earlier.  It is originally an xbox release though.  Took a bit of trying things to get it to run at 1080p, but eventually I did.
I tried it with a controller to begin with, as I figured it being a console port it would work best.  It doesn't seem to have any auto-aim. KBM it is, though even with mouse it appears the firing isn't terribly accurate.  I haven't checked if it has a way to change keys, as the dodge/take cover/run is on ctrl which I find difficult to use regularly, I could map it to one of the mouse buttons I suppose.  I'm not sure I'm going to stick with it.  It also has the 'red screen' damage, so you can't really tell how injured you are and it fades if you don't get hit for a bit which I find a bit hard to swallow.
I'm probably not going to stick with this very long.
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-Justisaur
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