Game of the Month - September 2018

Sorry I am a bit late, had a busy weekend between video card issues and vehicle issues, but fear not… behold the monthly game thread!

What has been your primary game this past month? It could have been a recent title, a new discovery, or something from your backlog. Or perhaps an old favorite you returned to years later?

For September I spent most of my time enjoying Two Point Hospital and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

I spent just about equal time with both, and am about 50% complete with both, heh. One scratches my decorate with all the things desire, the other scratches my loot all the things desire. :D

Honorable mentions for Darkside Detective , Antihero (A NEW MAP!) , and Painters Guild .

What game defined September 2018 for you? What was your Game of the Month?

Are you going to play Caulkmaster II: Leakproof! next?

This one slid in as my game of the month over the last two weeks as a surprise winner. Computer game, that is. There was no Boardgame winner.

Is that a real game?

EDIT: Steam link is here.

I clicked it!

NO REGRETS! <3

Such a busy gaming month! Gaming as a way to escape reality still works!

I (almost) cleared Lands of Lore, which was a nice game: it aged very well, and I was let down not by its mechanics, but by the rushing that it obviously suffered back then, making the second half the game much less memorable than the glorious first one.

Airships is a very fun sandbox, but a nasty bug cut my progress into it, and by the time it was fixed, I had moved on to Door Kickers: Action Squad, a very cool little action game. Our coop session (sadly singular so far) with Chappers was a delight, but the game was still very enjoyable single player.

I pursued my earlier retro adventures with Betrayal at Krondor, which probably would have been my game of the month if I hadn’t run into two jewels that, despite being genres apart, share a common quality: they are handcrafted ones.
Crosscode is pretending to be a retro-ish action RPG excepting that, so far, every single screen has been tightly designed. There is barely any filler. It is such a phenomenal design effort and has been so impressive for the first 15 hours, I am anxious to see if they keep on that crazy take for the rest of the game.
My Brother Rabbit is just a silly HOG that resonated so much with me for reasons I am still trying to figure, and that I cannot get out of my head. The work that went into designing every single screen and make their details so evocative is astounding.

So, this month’s will be My Brother Rabbit, and next month’s will probably be Crosscode, or so I hope.

Wishlisted!

I think for me it’s gonna be Din’s Legacy. Since my gaming HD failed a month ago, I’ve not had room for the big games I wanna play (Division, Steep, ESO, etc), so it’s been mostly DL with some Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition (which I’m playing through the first time and LOVING) along with Far Cry: Primal. Final runner up would likely be ADIOS Amigos, which is just a delight.

RimWorld - I was traveling most of September and without a gaming PC, which was a nice break. Came back home to find myself totally uninterested in the few games I had left in August, nor any in my “next up” backlog. Saw that RimWorld had a B19 update that is pretty close to 1.0 as far as content goes and decided to jump back in after a 2 year break. Fully hooked, vicious defeats over and over, and loving every minute of it again. Hae not scratched the surface of mods yet, besides a few QOL ones. Really excited to try the Fog of War mod (my biggest wish when I last played it), but need to get through a decent play through on vanilla first. Highly recommend, as always.

Factorio. Still.

grim-dawn

Grim Dawn. According to Steam I’ve owned this game for years. Also according to Steam, I only played it about ten hours before putting it away… many years ago. Now, my reasons for this are that the game seemed especially simple and straightforward, making it a very boring experience for me.

Recently I got a big old hairy bug up my ass to play a new ARPG. I have thousands of hours in Diablo 3, hundreds of hours in Torchlight II, and I was looking for something new. I decided to re-install Grim Dawn after getting inundated with Youtube recommendations telling me about a new Grim Dawn expansion. Right ad, right time and all that. So I reinstalled, bumped the Grim Dawn thread a couple times while I found new success and compulsion triggers in the game’s world of Cairn, and managed to play through the main campaign a few times in the last month. It turns out that my first build several years ago, while uber-powerful and all, was just straight up boring because all I had to do was hit a thing with a sword and watch them die in one hit. I mean, that’s cool and all, but I wanted a little more meat with my gravy.

So, I managed to dump about 80 hours into the game last month because I’m a stupid idiot that needs to go out more. But in the meantime I’ll keep hacking away at bad guys while waiting for the potential sale prices on current DLC when the new expansion drops in a month or whatever.

divinity-original-sin

I originally backed the Kickstarter for this game, and played it all the way through on the PC, back at release. But a week or two ago I noticed the Enhanced Edition was on sale for ten bucks on Xbox One. Now, even though I’d already played the the game, I did so before the Enhanced Edition, and before any other huge patches were released. My experience, though very fun and rewarding, was also complicated by horrible game-ruining bugs and campaign issues at the time. I had to keep reloading older saves and doing things over because certain quest triggers just weren’t working right. But I always wanted to go back and play this sucker again, without all those problems, and with a whole new party build. So that’s what I’m doing now.

Back when I first played it I used a mouse and a keyboard, as any self-respecting gamer is wont to do. But since I’m on Xbox, I am stuck using a controller, for what I was sure would be a horrible, disastrous, controller implementation. However, my fears were all for nothing because it turns out this is flat out the very best controller implementation for any isometric 3rd person perspective RPG I’ve ever played in my entire freaking life. It’s just perfect for this game, as far as I’m concerned, and I actually prefer it to mouse and keyboard simply because I’m getting lazy, and it’s just so simple to use.

It also looks fantastic on my Xbox. I mean, damn.

I had also recently started up the sequel on my PC, but I totally screwed up on my party build and I’m tempted to just scrap them and start over. I’m still mulling that over. I’m also tempted to find a comfortable way to play that with a controller now too, without being forced to buy it a second time.

That’s very interesting, and made me eager to play it, but then…

Does this mean the PC version of the first game, as well as the sequel, haven’t any controller support? Is this Diablo 3 all-over again? :(

They both do, (in EE for the first) but I hate using a controller at my desk. And streaming to my TV over my wifi is sub-optimal.

Ah, whew, thank you!

OK, who is your new Avatar? I need to know!

It looks like a Rabbid.

GIF2

Ahhh!