Steelrising

Steelrising was a game purchased specifically to test my graphics card.   It was a "Mostly Positive" soul's like clone but the biggest complaint people had was that it was poorly optimized, so I thought it would be a good test of this new Mamma Jamma.  Was it beautiful?  no ... I'm not sure why it needed a high end PC even on ultra, the landscapes were nothing better that we've seen. 

The game has you playing as a clockwork marionette/guardian of Marie Antionette, who is husband to a rogue king that has taken over the city with gigantic robot cyborgs in an alternate timeline where the French Revolution was quelled by automata. 

It played *just* like Dark Souls; iFrames, "souls", "bonfires" even talking to a bunch of NPCs hidden behind doors, all renamed to fit the time period/theme.  The enemies were all clockwork creatures, with the bosses being just gigantic steampunk versions of these.   Nothing spectacular for the story, effectively only you can travel the streets because of the metal killing machines - and you're rescuing the various aristocrats responsible for the situation who had enabled the mad king until he turned on them, hypnotized and imprisoned them in ... gigantic metal hurkuloid monsters, you know - as you do.

Story made no sense.   Time period was a bizarre choice.  No idea why this got a NC-17 rating, no boobs. No great memorable bosses.  Short game with a weird ending.  BUT - Damn fine Dark Souls gameplay.  This goes to show, if it is fun to play -- I don't even need boobs.

V Rising

I was confused in V Rising at first as to why I was building a castle, but that's because I thought this was also a single player game.  It's a multiplayer game that you play solo -- your castle is your place to collect gear and upgrade equipment, but much of the fortifications and minions you create serve no purpose in a single player server.

V Rising is a vampire MOBA, the kind of game ex-League players would shine at - you don't level as much as your skill level is based on the gear that you equip.  Defeating progressively tougher enemies awards upgrades that facilitate base management and gear upgrades.

Where the game seems to though is in PVP -- I've seen in videos and I almost don't want to bother at all.  My playstyle solo is so slow compared to the way these people are able to efficiently manage inventory/windows/upgrades.  

Also, my computer is crashing more and more regularly -- and this game that was one of the last that would actually play, is now starting a slow decay to repeated blue screens.

(cut to ...)

My computer has been repaired by my cloud save is corrupted and I both don't want to repeat what I've played and am too intimidated to try and do it online.  And I suppose thirdly, I'm excited to put my new graphics card to task.

Stray

Stray was a fun little jaunt as a cat.

While travelling as a group, you get separated and fall into the bowels and deep dark dystopian underground that is populated by robots who are making the best of it after all the humans died out.  There was a great plague that wiped out humankind you discover as you find your way to the control tower to open the city again.

Your companion and narrator is a small drone-once-human, a scientist who slowly regains his memory and leads you on the path to open the dome.  You never speak back to the robots, you're an animal - not a mutant, they simply assume (rightly so?) that you can understand them.

Thankfully the developers had the sense to keep it short enough that the novelty of quests where cats bat stuff off of shelves to find quest items didn't wear too thin.

Cat was adorable and well animated.

Modded Minecraft - All The Mods 7

I watched a couple videos and then got bit by the Minecraft bug again.   

All The Mods 7 is quite literal, the packs consist of every mod they can cram in for a certain version - so there is a good amount of overlap and a bit of finesse you need to put into to understanding that there might be 15 different types of lead bars.  

A big part of the resource gathering was with Productive Bees, so I managed to make few different bee factory monstrosities; a gigantic bee tower for end game resources, a self-radiating radioactive honeycomb cube, a menagerie cube with every type of bee. 

The end game requirements were absurd in their demands, and it encouraged some massive factories and terraforming to control game aspects, but I ended up crafting the Starry Bee.   I would consider this the end of the pack because the remaining bit would simply be waiting for a billion starry bee honeycombs to build the other end game items.

My base is not impressive, it's 80 pounds of factory packed into a 50 pound bag -- factory sprawl, spaghetti cable, an unorganized hodge-podge.  I like doing the stuff, I like making it work --- I am not very good at making it pretty.

Breathedge - Survive in Outer Space

I like Breathedge a lot - it has a 4th wall breaking GlaDOS style developer goofball humor, it's a crafting/survival game, it seems to be everything I might want in a survival game in fact ... unlike Raft, the crafting makes sense as a futuristic space game where you're actually replicating stuff and not using a gigantic wooden mallet to build it.

Like only reading the first 5 pages of what might be a great book -- I feel like this game didn't make it to the "gotta finish it" part of catching my interest.  

I gave up for a couple reasons ... Fussily I gave up because moving around in space without resistance was really frustrating.  Like I would have a vehicle parked outside an airlock, and if I didn't catch sight of it or missed it as I floated out, I might gas myself around for a bit just trying to reorient and find it.  Interest-wise I gave up because there wasn't a really good questing system, I saw I had quests - if you caught the voice over when you scanned whatever it was that spawned the quest, you might know a bit about it, but I couldn't figure out a way to track quests and fairly soon my screen became a mess of waypoints in space -- "Lower Radiation 0/6" okay --- but ... give me the waypoint or at least a vector and show me the damn quest log!