Streets? I'm not going outside! I'll whore myself to my employer thanks

lol, whoring.

Anyway, after several weeks of avoiding Control because of that f*cking anchor I decided to go play other parts of the game. I figured if I had a hard time beating it then, after a few weeks of not playing and losing all that muscle memory, there's no freaking way I'd beat it. Good thing too... Control is actually a really good game. There are sections that are too hard... many of the random events are way too much if you're at the beginning of the game. Also, some of the boss fights (like the anchor and the spore thing) are disproportionately difficult. But the gameplay gets pretty good as you pick up more powers... there are secrets everywhere... the story is pretty interesting... and some of the level design is freaking awesome.

Anyway, I think I "finished" the main game. I religiously read all the dossiers and watched/listened to all the video and audio recordings and whatnot, so I got absorbed pretty well into it. I'm really considering picking up the DLC. So yea... I'd recommend the game.

Huh, interesting. Those genres of games aren't typically up my alley, but i've been pleasantly surprised before by things i wouldn't normally play. The free games from Epic are pretty awesome... some real gems in there (and a bunch of trash).

I did end up picking up Control's DLCs and finished the first. I also keep exploring areas I already cleared and finding a ton of secrets I missed the first time around. Apparently Control 2 is going to be a thing, so I'm pretty excited about that as well.

Yeah the Epic store free games are pretty insane....a lot of them aren't that great, or smaller indie games, but occasionally they throw some actual hidden gems or full on AAA stuff at you. In Sound Mind fits the hidden gem bill as far as I'm concerned.

After finishing that I played Scorn, a sort of body horror Giger-esque survival horror puzzle game....for lack of a better description.



It's good but it has some issues that I took issue with, as a game. But in terms of its art direction and creepiness it gets a 10/10.

Back to playing Vampyr now, another one of those free Epic store games that is a lot better than I gave it credit for.

Finished Scorn, which was good but got a bit frustrating towards the end in terms of combat and navigation. But the game is thankfully short enough for it not to matter too much.

I also finished Vampyr, which I enjoyed quite a bit...the atmosphere, acting, art and story are all really good, as well as the world building. But the game offers a big city without any fast travel and has you backtrack a lot through areas full of enemies which gets old pretty quickly. You can ignore the fights mostly but even then you still have to spend the time running around. Overall it overstayed its welcome a bit but it was a very interesting game. I'd cautiously recommend it if you like the idea of playing a vampire doctor in early 20th century London ravaged by the Spanish flu.

After that I moved on to Ori and The Will of the Whisps...got it during the Steam Christmas sale. It's the sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, another platformer I liked. But this one builds on its predecessor in such a way that it does almost everything bigger and better and it's just an amazing game overall. The story, music and art are absolutely gorgeous, the controls are tight and sexy as hell, you can explore or just go straight to your goals, and it has a lot of fun quality of life upgrades you can get. If I had to give a negative I'd say the boss fights can get a bit frustrating, but I still beat all of them without too much effort even without maxing out my character. Anyway, really really good. For a taste (skip ahead 30 seconds or so)

Still playing Long Dark. New region was released in December, so currently exploring that.

5 year old daughter likes watching me play, even through the horrifying wolf attacks.

Hopefully she won’t be traumatised.

The cartoons kids watch make your wolves look like law abiding citizens

Yea, children's cartoons are surprisingly insane.

I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077. It's a fun game... plays a lot like Grand Theft Auto or something. Thankfully it seems most of the really breaking bugs have been addressed since its release, though from what I understand the PC version was never all that bad. I think i've had one crash the whole time I've played and I've had a handful of quests bug out so I had to reload a previous save. With how many hours I've put into the game, that's not so bad.

Our Ark server bugged out. Initially only the guy that ran the server could connect to it. I set up a local dedicated server and grabbed the save files and stuff from him so I could clone the server. Shiny and I can see the local server... but nobody else can. We're in a bit of a holding pattern while we try to figure out wtf to do.

Not sure how much stuff or how visible is on your local network, you might try setting up a vpn. Might even set up a separate router like asus that have built in vpn server with open vpn to your network so they only see stuff behind that asus router. It's not gonna be pretty but should help. You can add vlan with managed switch for extra security.

For vpn encryption, very low or none, to avoid ping/latency issues i guess. And i don't mean the password encryption, i mean the actual tunnel encryption after the connection is made.

Yeah but cartoons are nothing like the 90’s. The missus has banned The Simpsons thanks to the Itchy and Scratchy skits. To be fair, they are quite violent!

They still pale in comparison to Ren & Stimpy. I look back at those episodes and wonder how the hell were they allowed to air

Weird you mention Simpsons, we're actually doing a watch through of them all. Haven't watched them properly since I was at home (2002ish) but have seen the odd newer one and they're mainly just shit. Itchy and Scratchy has always been violent but I'm actually surprised at how some of the later ones (we're in season 22 now I think) don't just throw out some double entendre but just go full blown, in your face, sex joke! (There's a sex joke in there too haha). Not something I have an issue with but since it's always been seen as a family cartoon it feels really out of place.

Ren and Stimpy was weird and fucked up and I loved it

Errrr just to stay on topic I'm not playing much. WoW and UO really, the odd bit of Pokemon thrown in. I keep trying to get back on Ark but my settings keep resetting themselves which just pisses me off.

Regarding the Ark server issues, I've got port forwarding set up and the server shows up for Shiny and I in the Steam browser. I can even VPN to Europe, then connect back to my server (with some great lag). It may be due to the 3 mods that are installed, or some weirdness with the server or client version. Initially when I set the server up locally, I still couldn't see it until I manually unsubscribed and resubscribed to the mods and copied them over to the server from my machine after they downloaded. I then had to unsubscribe/resubscribe to the mods on Shiny's machine before she could see it. The same steps didn't work for anyone else though.

Bleh, anyway, coming toward the end of Cyberpunk 2077. At this point in the game I'm pretty much an unstoppable killing machine. Nothing quite like causing someone's cyberware to short out and/or melt down with a hack. In the harder fights I rarely even use guns any more.

I finished Cyberpunk 2077. It was a good game and I'm sorry to be moving on. I got the same feeling from Witcher 3. The ending is a bit depressing, but so was Witcher 3.

I'm playing MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries now. You can walk around your ship and talk to like 2 people... the character models are terrible, the voice acting and writing aren't very good, and I'm a bit lost what exactly I'm supposed to be doing. However... piloting mechs, earning morning, and blowing crap up is a lot of fun. I wish the maps were a bit less contrived and a bit larger, but it's fine. I don't foresee me buying the DLC... I'll play the campaign and then move on to something else.

I couldn't get into long dark, maybe because I just never really got the mechanics down. I got as far as the intro where you're trying to kill a bunny to eat and screwed it up so bad and continually I just ended up dying. Those mechanics you mention above sound pretty annoying though. Not sure I could get into this.