Nice. I need a good gaming laptop if I'm going to be spending my time in several different countries soon. If HR ever gets off their ass and offers me something before it's too late.

Btw, I finished Company of Heroes 2 and I have to adjust my opinion slightly. The game gets quite a bit better as the campaign progresses. The reason for that is that you're playing as the Soviets, so early in the campaign you're constantly on the backfoot and being overrun by hordes of German troops, but when you get past Stalingrad you got them on the run. Like irl obviously. So the first part of the campaign is frantically trying to hold positions and withdrawing against overwhelming odds, destroying equipment and buildings as you're doing so to stop them from falling into German hands. The second part is more traditional Company of Heroes: you get a base, are given a map with capture points and an objective and have the time to plan and move up in an orderly fashion.

Now, I can appreciate this from a narrative pov, but throwing a new player into several consecutive 'unwinnable' scenarios where you have to defend 3-4 fronts against endless attacks is probably not the best way to introduce people to your game and systems. At least throw in a proper tutorial scenario or two set in a different region/part of the way first. As it is now the campaign front loads most of the difficulty and craziness and lets you relax towards the end. I was whistling my way through the last few missions, after barely escaping with a win in the first few. Again, I'm sure that's how it was in reality, but that doesn't necessarily make for a good game campaign.

Yea, that sounds pretty tough. I'm not really sure how you could hand the soviets some easy battles without taking some liberties with history, though. Maybe training scenarios... but again, taking liberties.

I dunno, they must have had SOME wins early in the war? I'll admit I'm not expert on the history of the Eastern front, but I can't imagine they lost everything everywhere. Maybe do like a mission in a remote region or something where they crushed some partisans.

Have been playing a lot of Darkest Dungeon over the past few weeks - a friend of mine gave me the DLC and it was quite good. It solved some of the grinding issues by allowing you to leave the (long) DLC dungeons at any point without consequence, and then entering them again where you left the dungeon before. It still had some minor grinding issues (for invitations to enter the new dungeons) and I almost gave up because I had to grind the old dungeons for them, but stuck it out. I'm happy I did but it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I really wonder what they're going to do with the sequel (which has been announced) when it comes to the grindy parts. It's a game I love and hate in almost equal measures.

Other than that been doing some coop play on Divinity Original Sin 2 and did some couch gaming on Guns, Gore and Cannoli (surprisingly fun side scrolling shooter). Also, just did We Were Here with a friend which is a free asynchronous coop game. Basically you are both in separate rooms and need to figure out riddles together by communicating over walkie talkies (voice chat). It's really quite cool and fun. There are sequels and they're paying, but the first game is free and worth a download. Especially when you're a gaming couple. https://store.steampowered.com/app/582500/We_Were_Here/

Time for an update: i have about 125 hours in this game, and i just finished the "main big monster". That's pretty much all gaming i've done in 2019.

Now that i'm posting: Happy 2020 already

Haha J! Hey, if you're having fun I'm not going to judge. Happy 2020!

I bought the Starcraft 1 remaster (and the remaining 2 Starcraft2 campaigns) during the Blizzard Thanksgiving sale and been mostly playing through the remaster.

Close to done with the Brood War expansion now. The remaster is mostly a graphical/presentation overhaul and doesn't change the gameplay, which makes it clear how good of a game the original Starcraft really was. It holds up almost entirely and is challenging, engaging, exciting and satisfying to play. The balance between the 3 vastly different factions is so fine-tuned it's ridiculous.

The only downside of them not touching the gameplay (in order to not split the MP playerbase) is that it retains some limitations that are pretty annoying in this day and age. Max group selections of 12 units, bad pathfinding for some larger units, stuff like that. But even that really doesn't affect how good the game is. Impressive.

Phantom Doctrine atm.

How is it? Compared to say, XCOM2?

@ Satis, I saw you and Shiny got GTFO which looks amazing. I know it's still in early access though. What are your impressions so far?

GTFO looks promising, but only played it once with Shiny and two of our regular gaming buddies. The four of us are mainly working on the Ghost Recon: Breakpoint raid rather than GTFO.. I imagine once we beat or tire of that, we'll hit GTFO more. It's interesting so far, but hard to say more than that.

Mostly playing World of Warships (for years now), Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, and lately Sproggiwood, which isn't so bad, actually. Not much time to play games with work and life, though. Ugh. I hate being an adult a lot lately.

Uninstalled Phantom Doctrine mid-game. The game kept crashing and the game-play felt lacking. You do get new weapons and skills but the missions play out pretty much the same as the first mission.

Switched to shadow of tomb raider. Getting a little deja-vu feeling with this one but damn.. it's still interesting and a high quality game.

The boring winter night's have drawn me back to some gaming...

The Long Dark - It's been updated, so ive reinstalled it and started a new survival story.
Rome 2 Total War - Installed it, played a few turns, but got reminded how flawed it is. Uninstalled.
AoE2 Definitive Edition - Installing as we speak.
Starcraft 2 - It's free now. Played a few coop games with O'Cram but god they've dumbed it down. Uninstalled.

Damn...gonna give it a pass then. :-/ Maybe Phoenix Point will be the TBS game that will grab my attention (when I get around to buying it).



Cool, keep me updated. Hoping it gets out of early access soon so I can get a better idea of its merits from general gaming press and other coop enthusiasts.



How's it going? I have played a little since the new update but ended up hating it...not for any particular reason really. Just got bored with trekking back and forth in the new 'challenge' when i've done it for so long in sandbox. The challenge basically artificially made me walk up and down maps I already knew like the back of my hand so that really bored me to tears. I will say that the new timberwolves added a nice new type of challenge, and the handgun is a neat addition too. MMm ok I just checked the updates again and apparently there's a new region. Now that may actually be fun to explore with my longstanding survival game (on voyager so fairly easy, but 250 days or so in and not a care in the world).

Funny you mention Starcraft 2 - I bought the full campaign over Christmas (Zerg, Protoss and Nova missions) and I loved it. Such a massive amount of content, decent story, super polished campaign and fun gameplay. I played Heart of the Swarm on normal but in hindsight that was way too easy, so played Legacy of the Void on hard and that gave me a decent challenge. I may go back to Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm to play them on Hard for the heck of it. I will say that one of the missions in the epilogue kicked my ass on hard. Was a bit of a reality check.

What's dumbed down about the coop? I've never played it.

Installed Fallen Order, played for a few hours, uninstalled. This game is basically Guitar Hero or something where the only thing matters is button press timing. Couldn't give a f*ck about the protagonist or the story so the game is a fail from my perspective.

Currently playing Tropico 6 and some MOW:AS2 for diversity.

Hahaha! Yeah that's a lot of console action games for you these days...

How's Tropico 6? I love the series but waiting for the price to drop on this instalment.

As my main desktop gaming machine is still in Malta I've been playing laptop friendly games...I got a new laptop but it's hardly Alienware or anything like that, so not really reserved for new games at higher resolutions. Played Rogue Legacy (and beat it) and Spelunky, now on to Legend of Grimrock 2 and XIII (and old shooter game with a comic book style). Also tried to get to the new region with my 250 day survival game in The Long Dark but...died. Hahaha. I might start a new game now. We'll see!

So been doing a lot of laptop gaming because of the, you know, pandemic.

Finished Rogue Legacy, great game but felt a bit let down by some of the grindy shit in between. Bounced of Legend of Grimrock 2 because of its insistence to have some 'old school elements' that make for shitty gameplay. Specifically, there was a level with a "mist" enemy that was invulnerable to any weapon I had in my party. Fair enough. You're supposed to come back later and fight it when you have a weapon that can hurt it, which I can appreciate. But because of the way grimrock works (square based movement/gameplay) this enemy also could effectively block you into a corner, with no way for you to fight it OR move past it. BUT IT'S A MIST. At least let me walk through it for some damage, instead of being an instant game over! Jeez. And there were many little things like that that didn't make sense or were poorly communicated. It's a shame since it's clearly a labor of love and a great game in some other ways. Oh well.

Surprisingly, the XIII shooter was really, really good. Even by today's standards! It had a great art style (that saved it from becoming completely obsolete by now I think), interesting story, fun gameplay and some neat spy stuff like grappling hooks, zip lines, lock picking, bugging rooms and so on. The game balanced the shooter stuff well with the other elements. The only drawbacks were the save system (autosaves, not terribly sparse or bad but still shit) and the "To be continued..." ending. And they never made the sequel. I have read the comic books the game is based on so I already know the full story, but still. A bit anticlimactic.

After that I tried a few older and newer games....Lands of Lore 2 (promising), Ultimate Doom (always fun), Kentucky Route Zero (played the first act, looks great) and I got Pyre waiting for me for couch play. And there's a few other games I still want to get back to for DLC or updates like Two Point Hospital and The Long Dark. So not gonna be bored anytime soon! Looks like this Steam backlog is finally coming in handy haha.

Started playing Kentucky Route Zero (first two episodes) and quite enjoyed it. Very slow but really nice with a glass of whiskey.

Also playing the enhanced edition of System Shock (1) and Pyre. System shock takes some getting used to because of the extremely old control scheme but I think I got a handle on it now. Pyre is just really fun all around with beautiful artwork and good gameplay. I loved all of Supergiant's previous games so not surprising. (Bastion, Transistor)

Oh and because I was frustrated I couldn't play the new Doom because my PC is still overseas, I played through the original again - Ultimate Doom. Was surprisingly good and fun, actually. The level design really is that good. Kenshi is still on the to do list! If I can run it.