This week I played a lot MC Eternal on a friend's server. Minecraft is still a lot of fun in the right circumstances, and this mod (or collection of mods) adds a lot of new interesting things to the game. It's extremely rough around the edges though. It crashes a lot and literally takes 10-15 minutes to load. Some of the custom enemies also just kill you before you can work out what happened, or if anything happened.
I started playing Ugly, a puzzle platformer loosely in the style of Braid. It has fantastic art and a great gimmick themed around swapping with a ghostly clone that moves in opposite directions. The plot seems very good, but it has a nasty tendency to crash after every boss fight (which themselves are spectacular but not enjoyable).
I picked up Sunless Skies. It's an enjoyable take on the gameplay first game in the series, Sunless Seas. Except instead of piloting a ship around a haunted underground sea, you are driving a ship around haunted space. Very good writing, and the trading mechanics are compelling. The collision detection annoys me a bit.
Talented is a "roguelite" game where you attack enemies coming down lanes in the four cardinal directions. The main gimmick is an enormous pseudo-randomized talent tree for each run. It's a textbook example of the worst trends in so called roguelites (compared to the true roguelike.) It's impossible to win in the first run, and then the hyper-glimbus unlocks and then it becomess impossible to lose. The runs themself are fun and there's a decent variety of character powers and enemies, but as said previously many become immediately obsolete. It is in early access though, so I'm hopeful.
Grezzodue 2 is a Doom total conversion from Italy that claims "THE MOST EDGY, ULTRAVIOLENT AND BLASPHEMOUS ALL ITALIAN-FPS EVER IS RETURNED". It looks and plays like a bad late 90s Doom total conversion or early Megaman Romhack where the robot masters are all called "FUCKDICKCRAPMAN". I don't speak enough Italian to know if it's actually offensive or not, but I'm going to assume from the gratuitous nudity and gore that it is. Title theme is a banger, but the game is probably not really suitable for anyone tbh.
Gridroad an early access traffic management game where you build roads to get cars from a source to a destination. Has promise, but it's pretty short so far and the lane drawing rules are needlessly complex. 90% of the puzzle solving is dealing with the very boring and cumbersome traffic light system.
I had high hopes when I started Incarnation, a mouse-driven platformer. Where you start as an immortal floating god blob, but lose a power of your choice from an inverse talent-tree at the end of each level. Neat concept, but the game almost immediately throws mechanics not suitable to the mouse at you, and they've managed to somehow import horrible FPS ladders into a 2d game. There's a glitch where the aiming is slightly off too, which fucks everythong up. Despite the negativity in this paragraph, I'd like to give it another go because the concept is great and there seems to be more there.
Rating System
In my 2024 log I'm experimenting with a weekly game rating system. My experiences with games are cautiously rated on this scale: GREAT -> Good -> OK -> Disappointing -> BAD
Important GREAT or BAD games will be marked as (Notable)
All Games Played
- MC Eternal: Good
- Ugly: Good
- Sunless Skies: Good
- Talented: OK
- Grezzodue 2: OK
- Side Pocket (SNES): Good
- Gridroad: Disappointing
- Incarnation: OK
- My Summer Car: OK