Running video games (and consoles) thread

Bought Elden Ring on a whim and while it's a sexy game, how much damn time am I going to have to spend grinding and leveling up before I can even tackle the simplest of opponents? Much like Demon Souls, incredibly difficult game.

 

GT7 is marvelous. Can't describe how fun it is to drive the Nurburgring and watch the replays in 4K cinematic mode with ray tracing.

 

My tolerance for those kind of games is so low nowadays. Like, I gave the original Demon's Souls about an hour of my time in 2010, and just couldn't be bothered after that. I'm happy to play stuff like the Fallout games and Outer Worlds on normal difficulty, but I'm not shy about bumping the sliders down if I'm hitting a rough patch that is due to my skill, vs. a game design or progression decision.

 

Elden Ring is a great game for me to watch others play, but I'm not going anywhere near it myself. If I want to sink myself into a 100-hour grindfest, I have the Final Fantasy VI remaster. Plus, Mars Horizon has the whole of my attention for the time being.

 

Ooo - Mars Horizon keeps coming up as a game I might like, but I already have such a queue to go through on Steam. I'm kind of between games right now, so I've been keeping it mellow with rounds of Civ6, before I decide what I want to tackle next. Ikenfell, Loop Hero and Super Slam Dunk Touchdown are the three I've bought most recently.

Also, FF6 is more of a graphical and musical redo than anything else. Even if you're going for all of the achievements, it should "only" take you 50 hours or so. You'd have to go for one of the more hardcore challenges, like getting all of Gau's Rage attacks, to hit 100 hours. That's in the Retro Achievements set, and even with fast forward, it took me about 45 hours to get that.

 

I have no shame over my Steam queue -- I see something I like, I get it or put it on the wishlist. Mars Horizon is good fun, even if I'm going wildly out of order. My agency's X-ray telescope is going to be up and running before we've even got a good look at Jupiter. Other than that and FF6, my most recent purchases are Let's Build a Zoo, Hollow Knight, and Airborne Kingdom (the latter of which was an Epic exclusive until a week ago).

And there is no way I'm spending enough time on the veldt to get all of Gau's special moves. This is purely a nostalgia playthrough. I did a bit of level cheesing with the raft ride, but it was nowhere near as egregious as I did with the SNES version in the 90s. My controller had a turbo setting, so I set the cursors in place and let the game run in a loop overnight. I awoke the next day to characters that were an order of magnitude overleveled.

 

I have it but life has kept me from starting it up. Can't wait.

 

Hey, guys, video games are getting longer. And players are getting older and have more responsibilities -- this 40-year-old federal worker and father of two just can't find the time to complete a game anymore. And there are soooooo many to play!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/03/18/game-length-open-world/

 

Lost Ark is much the same, but at least it's FTP. They had a sale, so I spent $15 on crystals to keep me in premium time for six months. Incredibly complex, so many systems to learn, and it all but requires you to run several alts to grind currency to keep your main growing. Hellacious treadmill.

 

Takes until the last couple paragraphs to acknowledge there are smaller, shorter games outside the AAA space. Like what you like, sure, but no one is forcing people to play open-world games from big studios. Hard to muster much sympathy.

 

But those are what all the cools play!!!

 

Is there a single newspaper anymore that isn’t a mixture of “Get off my lawn”, “Old man yells at cloud” and the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme?