What are you playing this weekend/these days?


Just finished Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time. Great game once again. Really enjoyed Clank's logic puzzles. First time I got the Rhino weapon, but it's pretty underwhelming for the amount of work you have to put in to get it. One of the most fun gadgets is a disco ball that makes enemies dance. Can't help but smile when big robots and even boss enemies start grooving out :-)

Since I can't find Tools of Destruction I guess I'll play the newest one on Playstation Live or whatever their streaming service is called now.
 
PS2 games look blurry on PS3 so I've been using pcsx2 on linux and now they look spectacular. Increased resolution & a few other tweaks and the games are crisp, fast and gorgeous. I've always felt many games look better on pc and this setup matches that. My games are: Half-Life, Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever, Shadow of the Colossus, NBA Street Vol 2, Ridge Racer V and Burnout 3 (current favorite). The only drawback, and it's a big one, is playing at my desk not sofa.
 
PS2 games look blurry on PS3 so I've been using pcsx2 on linux and now they look spectacular. Increased resolution & a few other tweaks and the games are crisp, fast and gorgeous. I've always felt many games look better on pc and this setup matches that. My games are: Half-Life, Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever, Shadow of the Colossus, NBA Street Vol 2, Ridge Racer V and Burnout 3 (current favorite). The only drawback, and it's a big one, is playing at my desk not sofa.
Not possible to get your PC image displayed on your TV and use a wireless controller for gameplay?
 
I have so many consoles and so many games its a bit silly. Actually it's my dream come true.
I have many consoles and handhelds, so I changed my setup so my living room is build around a large desk which features the TV but also my PC and monitor.
So, I can switch from gaming on my PC to playing via the TV on the sofa more easily. My modern consoles are also there, so enough options.
I can stream my PC's games to my other PC's, Steam deck or to my VR headset to. I do also have a Steam Link but it's aging.
Having some small Steam-device attached to your TV, and have a fast internal network, allows you to play on the big screen to.
 
Just finished the original Half-Life on PC.
I started a while ago but I didn't enjoy the Xen levels that much which included the boss fight at the end. So I finished it just under 16 hours, but the last hour or so I did today.

I played Black Mesa in the past, when those levels weren't there yet. So, I can do those now. I think they are improved compared to the original version.
 
Just finished Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. I ended up buying it since it's not available for streaming to PC. It's just fair anyway after pirating some of the old titles and having had a blast with those.

It's an amazing iteration on the old games. What stuck most with me are the visuals. Incredibly detailed with beautiful designs and spectacular vistas. It uses so much colour, materials, shaders it's a feast for the eyes. AMD dynamic upscaling was enabled and settings dialed to high by default, I never changed that and it ran splendidly. I only limited FPS to 120 via AMD control center so my PC wouldn't sound like a fleet of helicopters.

Animations, voice overs and SFX are all top-notch, music is good and I'd say the best in the series so far. The humor is back and there's a few feels involved, too.

I like the female counterparts to Ratchet and Clank, called Rivet and Kit. Both are strong females but at the same time likeable characters, never annoying - good job on that.

There are nods to several franchises like Star Wars, Rick and Morty, Ghost in the Shell and probably others I haven't picked up on.

The Arena is back with the most interesting content so far and you can now use it to reasonably level up your weapons which is a very welcome change. They slapped on an additional layer of gun improvement by introducing a collectible currency to spend on certain attributes of the shooters. There's a Rhyno again and this time around I really like it. I very much enjoyed that there are now four different weapons you can throw on the battlefield which will then go on to fight for you. I love stuff like that.

So far all of the major titles in the series had some activity that got on my nerves - not so Rift Apart. There are no space dog fights this time around but you could pilot a dragon that controls quite nicely. Speaking of controls - those have been changed favourably and worked well after half an hour of getting used to. They even let go of the joystick-circling and -waggling for certain interactions. Well done!

To sum it up - Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart is an opulent, bombastic and fun game. Highly recommended if you like platformers and third-person shooters. I am glad this game has found its way to PC and I am ready for the next iteration :)
 
Insomniac always made a great engine to run the Ratchet and Clank games. The games are fun but the tech behind it is equally impressive.
Somehow they hide all this tech and advertise the fun part more. I guess it's because they sell the game and not the engine itself. While they usually are a showcase of the latest hardware they made the game for.
 
Doom Total Conversion: Just finished Butcher's Summit, a three levels long prequel - another one :) - to Trench Foot. There's a windows standalone version available for download on ModDB. Just run the batch file. Quite difficult but impressive.
Screenshot_Doom_20260209_160147_smol.jpg
 
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Assassin's Creed

This game is very similar to WB games like Batman Arkham / Middle-Earth: Shadow / MAD MAX

Open world with towers to reveal subquests on the maps.

But maybe I waited too long to play this game, I'm pretty much disappointed.
The open world is there, but there's nothing to do outside of the main quests.
Actually there's the possibility to find and collect flags scattered around, but them are really too many ... like more than 500 ... not pointed on the map and not even highlighted in some way ...

The combat system is somehow ok, but starts to feel repetitive after the fifth time you are involved in a battle.
It's obviously the previous step before a free-flow combat system, so it's not so fun or good to watch like in the games I listed before.

The control over the character is not perfect, and many times I died because of falls I didn't expected, sometimes when near a corner the character changes direction just before the jump ...
In Batman Arkham the falls were harmless, and should have been like than even in this game, instead you "die" (but in the game it's a simulation so you can't die) and respawn in the last checkpoint.

The story is cool, but really slow because of the very repetitive gameplay.
I'm at 1/3rd of the game, but just playing the first chapter shows you everything the game has to offer, the rest is just a constant repetition of the same.

I'm trying to find the will to finish it, but it's really hard this time... and even as a "wannabe" completionist I will never search for all the flags.
 
The first game had its share of problems. Some were fixed in the sequel (I haven't played after Brotherhood), some weren't. But it also shows some promise of a game that could have been but never was, even in the sequels.
The accidental deaths due to the character not doing what you expected is something I've had again in the sequel and Brotherhood but it often made me laugh: the expert assassin with a perfect plan who jumps, kills a random civilian instead of his target then proceed to jump off a roof and fall to his death. It's similar to the comedy of errors that I often had in the first Hitman games. Too few games embrace failure.
 
Hitman is another serie in my backlog, I only played a demo many years ago for the second game... I started to be as stealth as possible, hiding bodies, walking slowly, then I accidentally shoot with the gun because I pushed the wrong button and the hell broke loose, it became a war zone
 
I just beat Metroid Prime 4. I enjoyed it a lot, it's a really refined game. I guess the reason it gets mixed reviews is because other Metroids have a more desolate and lost vibe. The controls are nice and mechanical, the blaster and elemental weapons control well with a nice rhythm. I liked the feel of the bike, doing skids like on a snowboard and picking up crystals is satisfying. The graphics are the most detailed I have ever played and very lush. When Samus gets hit she sounds like she's having unpleasant sex. Hmmmm... There's no bikini reveal at the end. Dammit. After playing so many Half-Life 2's I was wanting a more sci-fi vibe shooter and I got it. Story was bit meh though. I also didn't really jive on the music which tended to be epic god music, if you know what I mean. Minimal electronic would have suited it better.
 
Hitman is another serie in my backlog, I only played a demo many years ago for the second game... I started to be as stealth as possible, hiding bodies, walking slowly, then I accidentally shoot with the gun because I pushed the wrong button and the hell broke loose, it became a war zone
That's my experience with the first Hitman games as well (I haven't played the recent ones). I'd enter a room, try to pick up a weapon on a table, take a nearby hammer instead, hear someone coming, get in the closet, close the left door, open the right door, close the right door but open the left in the process, panic when the guard enters the room and sees a guy in a suit with a hammer frantically opening and closing the closet's door, run toward the guard, get shot a few times and finally hit him over and over with the hammer, try to pick up his gun to kill the other guards, pick up the body instead, try to throw the body at the other guards and get killed.

On an unrelated note, I've recently finished the campaign of Capitalism 2. It's a business management sim that I think is used as a tutoring tool in some business schools. It's pretty much 1990s textbook business management: find good opportunities, invest in factories/shop and use R&D, advertising and/or pricing to dominate the market. It's not a Paradox game, it doesn't simulate everything and the abstractions/simplifications are pretty obvious in many ways (even big department stores can only sell 4 different kind of products, you can plant any crops anywhere and each city has all natural resources available). Interestingly, it doesn't concern itself with worker management besides training: you don't get to fire your workers to try to lower the costs and please your shareholders. It also frankly tells that the endgame of a capitalist is to get away from capitalism and competitive markets and rather become a monopolist so that you can raise prices through the roof.

It's relatively fun, though you'll spend a lot of time doing routine stuff like adjusting prices that could have been automated to let you focus on other tasks. It could also have done with some notifications/filters or other ways to make it easier to deal with all your mines/farm/factories/stores when your company gets big enough. My main problem is that it's relatively easy: once you get profitable, you can usually borrow enough to generate more profits and invest in new markets and once you get a good enough market share in some products you usually print enough money to be able to conquer every other market. So the early game can be a bit tough and challenging (I sometimes had to restart because I tried to scale up too fast) but once you get past it, it's so easy that you feel like playing an idle game. I've finished a few scenarios by just waiting a few in-game years for my company's steadily rising profits to reach the threshold.

The scenarios try to make it interesting by putting you in different positions in different markets, but it rarely works very well. There's a scenario where you start with a meat selling industry that's getting challenged by cheap imports. The scenario hints that you should try to use by-products like wool, leather, eggs or milk. I just invested in drug factories, pharmacies and advertising and, as in most scenarios, that was enough to get to the "print money" stage.

It's a shame because even with the limited scope of the game there are interesting ways to try to beat the competition but most of the time you don't have to go any further than having a factory make a product and have stores selling it with enough advertising to drown the competition. I still had fun and played it all, so I guess it's not as bad as I make it sound. I just think it could have been better.
 
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