apsham

Minecraft Dungeons is out today and it's on Gamepass. I played a bit of it this morning - a really simplistic take on Diablo but it's aimed towards kids and it's fun for what it is so it's worth a play so far.

I'm going to do you a solid. The Owl House - go and watch it if you even midly like Gravity Falls. It was created by a storyboard artist on that show, and the Gravity Falls creator voices one of the main characters. Also a fun fact, Matt Chapman of Homestar Runner fame was an instrumental writer on that show for the first two seasons and then some and totally voiced Mermando, the Street Fighter parody characters and others.

I dipped back in for it. It certainly makes the world feel a hell of a lot better and improves it quite a bit - but it's really only worth playing FO76 if you have the subscription system that they're running with. It really is a fun experience while you have it - but it's an extra 20 or so a month so eh. Might dip in every once in a while I suppose.

Listen you two, there's a pen and paper thread for you to yell into the abyss about D&D. This is where we yell into the abyss about board games. That said - I think I'd do really well with D&D but I'm too nervous to say/do anything at proper times to get the most out of it. Same reason I think that I'd be really good at improv or at least have fun with it... but will likely never do so.

Hitman 2 wasn't episodic. They did some post release DLC, but when the game first came out the entire Hitman 2 core experience was there. One of the cooler things that they did was redo the Hitman missions in the Hitman 2 engine and make it all accessible from Hitman 2 if you owned the first one.

You'd be playing Fortnite and backpack dancing your way to school every morning, don't lie.

I'm up to date now with all of the Marvel Champions expansions and yesterday played my first game with the Ms. Marvel card set. We were taking on Rhino as Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk and just about had everything taken care of when my Nemesis card came up and this asshole showed up. Managed to stills squeek in a win just under the radar, but it's the closest that we've come to losing so late in a game AND the first time that we've had a nemesis deck introduced into the game.

Grand Theft Auto was my first introduction to modding and getting the most of out a game - there were tons of custom maps for the original game that changed things up. Age Of Empires is in close contention with Warcraft 2, but very much the same as GTA - it was one of the first games that showed me how you can mod, script and change things up and I think it also helped to foster the great interest that I had in history at the same time. Metal Gear Solid was probably the first big storytelling experience that I had, and one of the first times that I really wanted to know more about the characters in video games and start to expand past that. Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow expanded the personal interest that I had in games and moved it more into a social experience. Super Mario All-Stars / World came with my SNES which was my first console so... yeah, don't really need to say much there. These were the first things that came to my mind - there's a dozen others that could slot in here and be just as valid I think, but that looks pretty much on point.

Golf With Your Friends is out now, and on Game Pass so that's pretty awesome.

Ack. The original game is the one I'm interested in going through again. I will say that 3 was surprisingly good and very atmospheric but it's been too recent since I played through it.

RE; my post earlier about getting back into Mortal Kombat 11. This just makes it so worth it, can't wait for next week.

Two of the biggest things for us recently have been; 1. Watergate 2. Marvel Champions Watergate is an absolutely amazing two player only game where one person plays the Editors and one person plays Nixon, both trying to do their own objectives while stopping the other from completing theirs. It's absolutely amazingly tight and deserves every award that it has been nominated for and/or won. Marvel Champions is the LCG format perfected as well. I finally have one where it doesn't feel like I need to buy every pack that comes out for it... but since it's so good, that's exactly what I'm doing. The characters and the mechanics of how they play (Thor's powers being based around getting Mjolnir and using it, only to call it back into your hand, etc) just compliment the characters themselves so well.

This. I knew I was probably going to be into it the moment I heard Simmer earlier in the year, but yeah - this probably works as my AOTY so far as well. We'll see how quick that changes when Notes on a Conditional Form from The 1975 comes out next week though.

Bingo. Basically why Superman is the same colour scheme. And Wonder Woman, and the original Flash.... and Captain America... and it kind of goes on. Other factors kind of tie into it, it's kind of a mix of all of them in the end for some cases.

Super Mega Baseball 3 is out and man does it look tempting. I got the first two for free through Xbox, so I don't mind putting down the money for it eventually. Anyone pick it up yet?

I picked it up and got into it for a few days but I don't feel much of the need to go back. I kept wondering if the game was literally just building everything up only to have to island hop because you ran out of resources, etc - and that doesn't really interest me all that much.

It's not as bad this year as it has been - it was on GamePass and I've been playing it there. I made it to the NBA and I'm performing rather well with what I have as stats and I haven't spent any money yet. If you're just looking to play career and you don't care about being competitive online you should be fine. Look up a good build and you'll do fine in the standard game.

They're RPG games with turn based battle systems, but usually something to shake it up - they all generally use timed button presses to attack/enhance an attack/defend. And Mario being made of paper usually makes for some fun ways to traverse the world.

It looks like a far cry from the soulless, boring 3DS ones too so I'm interested.

This was exciting to hear when it was first announced but honestly - there's not much to the first two games. Good memories and all, but the stuff that came later in the THUG series and American Wasteland really built upon everything and made it a hell of a lot more fun than just doing runs and trying to cram in as many objectives as possible. Having open worlds to skate around in and do stuff BETWEEN missions was where the series really hit its stride.

@Dan B. Oof. Just had our first non-tutorial game and it was still a really good time. We decided to pull two monsters randomly and picked up the Wolf Man and The Invisible Man. Our initial pulls were amazing, lots of blue items at the Institute and the Laboratory with me playing the Scientist and able to add +1 to items to fill out his slots easier - and the Wolfman actually ended up targeting her so I was safe to sit there, get the cure really quick and basically have the Wolf Man beat in the first few turns before the Invisible Man even moved. The rest of the game was practically a breeze at that point, we even ended up saving every single villager - but here's the thing. I used every single Laboratory card to find the cure for the Wolf Man and we realized this as she was going around getting items to complete The Invisible Man's objective, so we literally had to hope and pray that the items ran out and THEN we could add them back to the bag and THEN we had to hope that one came out in time. It just so happened that one did, and we won the game with some luck in movement to get to him AND two cards to spare. What a fun game.

I saw that! But from what I gather it’s more of it’s own thing and you can’t mix it with the Disney ones sadly.

Ahh yeah, that’s the first one that comes with the base set I think, yeah? Every one of them changes the game and the style you can play to win - so that’s pretty neat.

I'm hopping all over that extension to Mortal Kombat 11 that they announced this week after hearing that Friendships are coming back, hell yeah.

Oh! Two things that I just remembered I wanted to call out. @Dan B. I picked up Horrified this week and we loved the first game. We played the suggested game and we LITERALLY won on the final move of the FINAL turn, last defeating the Creature. It was exciting the whole time and only worked out because I was stuck at the camp trying to find his hideout, while the girlfriend had The Courier and could run out and then instantly come back to bring me the tiles I needed to get down the path. @K Rivals for Catan was pretty awesome too! I got the base set and both of the expansions and we're working out way through that. Our current obsession is this. Along with all three expansions that are currently out for it. Amazing gameplay, and I'm really pissed that I thought it was just going to be a licensed garbage game without any depth. Every character plays just a little bit different, and you can even see hints of gameplay from other much bigger and deeper games. Highly recommended, very highly.