Re: Games played last week 2025 May 5 to 11

Are we do weekly games instead of monthly? Alright. I resumed playing
SW:TOR finally during the yrarly SW days. I still enjoyed it. Back to
BUSY life again. :(


Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com> wrote:

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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