We kinda... don't know you..? And you are asking for a free game?

Don't get me wrong, but if I where you I'd at least hang around a little more on the forums or discord before asking for a gift.

I have a lot of nostalgia for forums that doesn't exist anymore. Many of the Brazilian RuneScape forums from more than a decade ago comes to mind (Zybez is closed too!?). Another community that I miss is the legendary people from gotfrag.com forums. They dissected gaming mice like no other (mouse acceleration, prediction, optical vs laser, overclocking the usb clock rate, ...). Anyway...

HLTB is the only forum that I'm active. All the ones that I miss are already dead. Same for the interesting ones that I eventually stumble upon, dead.

(small rant: I think reddit stole a lot of people from traditional forums and it's not a replacement for those at all)

What about you? Are you active on any message board other than HLTB?

Changing the subject a bit, it's hard to find another soundtrack as beautiful as Bloodborne's. I think this is the best live video game music performance ever made:

Fresh news: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/sony-bullies-bloodborne-60fps-mod-off-the-internet-with-dmca-takedown-as-it-continues-to-let-the-fromsoft-classic-gather-dust-on-ps4/

Also, I heard that Bluepoint was working on a live service game that was cancelled, one of many live services in development after Concord spetacular failure. That's not good news, Bluepoint is the studio that worked on Demons' Souls remake (amazing game!) and would be the obvious choice to work on Bloodborne.

Ok, I'll be the one to ask: why do you think such an important game is still 'trapped' as a 30fps PS4 release?

I try, it reminds me of Guild Wars 2, but I'm not sure.

Does it remind you of the Charr? Or maybe Asura?

Imagine Resident Evil but instead of zombies... dinosaurs!



From what it seems this is not those lazy releases of a game image plus a bundled self contained emulator running it. It's actually a port. 4k, 60fps, controller support. And it's pretty affordable.

Oh nice, I did mean 6 as you said last year haha.

Here's mine:

Out of curiosity, I've sent this image to ChatGPT and it gave me a very specific answer, in detail. If it's correct I'll be impressed.

(I will not post here as a guess because I want to keep the game AI free, do you part too!)

Mad Max?

What music, dear Mary?

Oh nice, I did mean 6 as you said last year haha.

Here's mine:

Rage maybe?

This was one of my favorite boomer shooter experiences. There are so many small quality of life features that fix almost all the gripes I usually have with this kind of game.

The main problem with games similar to the original doom is the level design. Finding the colored keys to unlock doors is fine until you find yourself in an unintentional labyrinth. I love getting lost in a good zelda dungeon, for instance, but it doesn’t gel well with this kind of game. Thankfully, there is a magic trail that guides you to the right path with just the press of a button. No shame in using that.

The weapon variety is great, and during the more chaotic encounters, I found myself strategizing a bit (but not too much) about which weapon to use for which enemy.

The game does feel slightly unbalanced at times, but it is not a deal breaker. Checkpoints can also be a bit odd. Sometimes you get one right after another, while other times it feels like ages before the next one.

The one negative part of the game that drove me nuts is that if I load an auto-save from the campaign, I have all my weapons. But when I decide to restart the level (within the same campaign), I lose all my weapons. That wouldn’t be such a big problem, except some of the better weapons are pretty rare to find again.

The music felt kind of generic, but the sound design is excellent.

Result: completed

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ good controls
+ great weapon variety
+ quality of life features

Cons:
- easy to pick up and play
- unbalanced moments
- bad checkpointing

Screenshots:


My loyal companion.



What a no-filler experience.

I couldn’t care less about the story. I’m not a warhammer person. The shooting feels amazing, and chainsawing through enemies is even better.
There aren’t a lot of branching paths, collectibles, or "protect this civilian while danger happens" moments. You just go forward and kill everything in your path, and I loved it.

I do wish the level design were a bit more creative, maybe with more environmental elements to use or avoid during combat. A few more enemy types wouldn’t hurt either.

I beat the game in two sittings, but you could easily finish it in one if you have the time. The campaign is too short, but I got the game on a good sale, so I can’t complain. Honestly, I prefer a great game that’s too short over a bad one, no matter the length.

Result: completed (7h 30m)

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ chainsaw
+ no filler
+ good controls
+ good audio design

Cons:
- level design is too simple

Screenshots:


You talkin' to me?


YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?


Now that’s a big f’ing gun.



Sadly this game run like *** on my machine. Another case of my CPU not being able to handle a game (looking at you Path of Exile 2). The amount of stuff happening in the background made it unplayable.

Retired until I get a better rig…

Result: retired

Star Fox 64 for regular and Axiom Verge for anniversary are my picks.

Another "tech support for myself" kind of post:

Blizzard doesn't list the old Diablo 2 installer on their main website anymore since there is a remake now, but it's downloadable here (game) and here (LOD expansion).

>new< Nintendo Switch

In this kind of game (ARPGs, that is), I always go for the ranged option, and I wasn’t disappointed. The class was fun to play, and I managed to create a workable build without looking anything up online. The skill tree is more daunting than it looks. I focused on speed, poison, and ice. Apply status effect on crowds, run, status effect again, run, rinse and repeat, then finish off the last enemies with regular attacks.

One of the best things about this game is the bosses. They are surprisingly varied and require learning their patterns and strategizing a bit, but never too much.
The enemy variety is great. The three acts are vastly different in terms of characters you meet and places you visit. The music and sound design are also excellent.

An innovation of this game that I like, but not everyone loved, is that you move with WASD (instead of clicking), and there’s a dodge roll (a must for bosses). It’s a tad slower paced than most games of the genre too. Some folks even started calling it a souls-like, but I wouldn’t classify it as one of those at all.

Other than stash space, all the microtransactions are cosmetic. One amazing quality-of-life feature: despite being an online game, you can pause. That’s right, if you’re playing alone, you can pause the game.

It pains me to retire this game, especially because I was right at the end of the main campaign and was enjoying it a lot. But I reached a particular boss (Viper Napuatzi) in which my FPS dips to 20, which makes it impossible to beat it. There’s a specific quick attack that kills me in one hit, and it’s impossible to dodge with such sluggish performance.

Changing graphical options didn’t help (even playing on potato mode at 1024x768). I think the fault lies with my CPU (which isn’t the greatest). But on the other hand, the game is also at fault: it doesn’t feel like there’s enough going on in the fight to make the CPU struggle this much.

I’ll probably check if things on this fight particularly improves on my end after it leaves early access. Fingers crossed.

Result: retired

Rating: 9/10

Pros:
+ stellar boss designs
+ beautiful graphics
+ great music and sound design
+ fun builds
+ WASD movement option

Cons:
- server issues
- performance dips
- some in-game descriptions are too vague

Screenshots:


Are those..?


Yup. And what a comforting justification.


What’s going on down there in that cage?

Mine's an Interrobang, an obscure punctuation mark that combines an exclamation point and a question mark. I just think it looks cool and I don't remember why I chose it beyond that.

There's an unicode character for this‽

Whoa‽‽‽

My niece, who was 8 years old at the time, drew me and my kittens.

You just won the award for the cutest avatar

Mine is from PSN, pretty much the only one that I liked out of the predetermined choices. Oh, and of course, it's just a monkey from the game Ape Escape.

What's up with yours?

This is a double-A gem.

This game feels old school in the best sense of the term: great level design. It saddens me when I think the crazy amount of procedurally generated roguelikes in the indie world and how everything became open world in the AAA space. Thankfully, this is neither.

For the love of god, Zelda and Dark Souls became Ubisoft-style open world games. Oh, that’s a rant for another day, back on the subject.

The weapons are all thematically themed (fire, ice, etc) and the game makes you use their variety both in combat and exploration, mostly in combat. Most of the enemies are color coded, it’s not really a task of figuring it out what to use it and more of doing weapon swapping while being agile and avoiding damage.

The combat is demanding, but the game felt perfectly balanced on the normal difficulty, I wouldn’t change a thing. When reading some of the Steam reviews, to my surprise, people do complain as being too difficult though.

I have a theory why: moving around is slightly clunky and the game is very demanding in that regard, you are constantly moving, dodging, and turning in midst of fights. Didn’t feel like a problem to me though, quite the opposite, the ‘clunkiness’ is pretty consistent and predictable. It actually allows you to be more precise than an otherwise ‘floaty’ movement.

Just like with the combat, the puzzles felt spot on. I wouldn’t change a thing.

I have just a couple of minor complaints. A particular boss could have a bit of a hint that there is a gimmick and how it works. Another one is that some enemies requires you to turn 180 degrees and the camera takes too long to do that (I played with a controller). A dedicated button to turn around would be perfect in this game.

Result: completed

Rating: 9/10

Pros:
+ stellar level design
+ great combat
+ great weapon and powerup variety
+ atmospheric
+ easy to follow story

Cons:
- turning the camera around could be tweaked
- some bosses could have better hints

What did I just play?

I usually avoid walking simulators or old school adventure games because I know I don’t have the patience for them, but recently I’ve been trying some of them and liking it. Maybe I’m just getting older.

There are some little puzzles, I had to look up on the web for a couple and it felt more like bad UI and not really my fault. But overall they didn’t halt my gameplay too much.

What’s unique and the very best about this game is that this is actually what “psychological horror” is supposed to be. A lot of games emphasize horror as something outside of your mind. Not here, in this game you play in first person characters going insane. I love it.

I don’t care about the spoilers on this one: there is a cannibalism scene. Thankfully, not too graphic due the low res artstyle. They could have warned it though.

Result: completed (2h 30m)

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ more psychological than horror
+ charismatic characters
+ memorable moments
+ immersive

Cons:
- a couple of easy to get stuck moments
- the game should warn that contains sensitive themes

Hmm... it doesn't look like the classic of the genre, man standing

I played a bit of it this weekend, couple of hours or so. It's not the 10/10 that some nostalgic folks make it out to be, but it's a great chill game. There's enough strategy to make me think a bit on what to do on the battles, but not too much, exactly as I wanted it.

For some reason I was expecting a paper themed story, like mushroom kingdom is turned into paper or something.

I don't know why, but RetroArch from steam is not been able to download thumbnails (at least for me). The solution was to download everything, extract it, and put on "RetroArch/thumbnail/" folder. Takes a bunch of space (~10gb for me), but solves the problem for good.

https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/libretro-thumbnails

Microsoft keyboard and mouse center, or something like this, recognized my new rodent friend but I can only adjust DPI and set some macros on the mouse.

Also, I never expected you could get the polling rate through a website, pretty neat: https://cps-check.com/polling-rate-check. Might not be the most precise thing in the world, but it works. I tried a bunch on configuration on my machine (Linux) to force it to be polled less frequent and help me test it (no luck btw).