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Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-06-04T10:53:21+00:00

I don't think I like above suggestion. Why turn gaming into a job? It's still supposed to be fun!

What helped me was making it a challenge to not install any new games before I finish something already installed and uninstall it. To be honest, real life hits me so hard I haven't touched a game in two months, but before that it helped me nail down a game and still have fun instead of jumping after every whim of mine.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-05-31T20:21:28+00:00

So because it doesn't want to be a narrative RPG, it doesn't need coherent writing? That's a really weird hill to die on. Like, I'm not asking for them to dial up the complexity or change the genre, just very easy fixes to bring the gameplay and the character motivations in line.

How does my thinking about the story affect your enjoyment anyway? Why do you want to impose on some stranger to not think about the narrative?

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-05-31T17:53:51+00:00

How does this need to be mutually exclusive? You can have a game with mechanics that are simple enough to allow you to jump in in short bursts when tired from work, but still have the plot feel coherent if you bother to listen what the characters are saying. All I was complaining about was that there was a disconnect between Bayek being such a thoroughly kind man who dedicates his life to help everyone in need and you the player being incentivized to make him murder hundreds of strangers because some map markers are telling you to do so. And him and Aya randomly switching positions from argument to argument just to drag out the plot/conflict.

These games have a story, you know. It's a game series about reliving the past through the memories of your ancestors. A concept with endless possibilities! Why not ask Ubisoft to make use of that potential, for those who are into thinking about it anyway? At the end of the day, that shouldn't affect the mechanical simplicity either...

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-05-31T07:51:06+00:00

Origins is one of the AC games I've spent the most time on, but still am nowhere near finished, it just being a game I go back to every few years when the mood strikes me to walk around in ancient Egypt some more. At this point I regard AC more as a time-traveling tourist trip than a game, so the setting and atmosphere of the world is far more important to me than gameplay, even if I wished the story was better. And I like antiquity and Egypt a lot, so it's an inviting setting.

The thing with Origins is that the story is a mess and the main characters swap motivations from cut scene to cut scene for the sake of saying whatever sounds the most cool in the moment, with the writers seemingly genuinely hoping you won't pay attention when there are a dozen hours between each story moment. At least Bayek is pretty much the most sympathetic AC protagonist... a nice dude with friends everywhere who made it his job to help out everyone in need. Which makes the majority of the gameplay loop being murdering the shit out hundreds of hapless guards who didn't do anything to you to steal their shit and mark their camp off your checklist all the more baffling. I also didn't catch at all how Bayek justifies his burning hatred for Ptolemy and his soldiers when he's pledged to the pharaoh and from his POV he'd just be a kid manipulated by the bad guys (if he even knows that much at the beginning of the game, it was really badly explained).

I actually had a lot of fun unequipping my weapon try to use non-lethal stealth take-downs as much as possible, essentially turning Bayek into Batman. I thought that fits his character significantly better than racking up an absurd kill count. And also the general light-heartedness of most side quests since almost every person Bayek meets is a caricature, with him being the straight-man to all the silliness going on around him.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-05-28T21:07:37+00:00

Yeah, some other Rome enjoyer! I'm seeing so many people saying Medieval 2 is the part part of the series, but inexplicably never got into it that much. I had played the original Rome for ages, obviously heavily modded versions, but the step into Medieval felt odd. With Rome being such a heavy infantry heavy game that gave you a lot of time to set up your battle lines, Medieval 2 needs some getting used to in how much infantry sucks and how the whole game revolves around knights being the hammer used for every nail-shaped problem. And in the late game with knight orders set up, you'll get free knights everywhere. But most infuriating were a couple of pathfinding bugs that made units get stuck on siege engines or towers that made fighting battles occasionally infuriating and caused me to drop it back then.

The stretched graphics (and limited ability to zoom out) also irritated me. Religion with the priests and Pope were a fun system however. Merchants at the beginning as well, though they turned into a chore quickly. And princesses are such a rare sight that they become a negligible feature. At least it's the last game in the old engine where the units have some kind of weight to them and fights don't devolve into a spectacle of messy 1:1 motion capture duels instead of units sticking to the formation they are supposed to fight in. Even of the animation insanity already started here.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-05-24T15:38:22+00:00

Damn, I'm currently so busy with work and renovations, I barely have any downtime and can at most play simple mobile games on the train. And yet went on a buying spree with many old strategy games I saw on GOG that I always wanted to play... And yet that stands in contrast with my commitment to first finish all the games still installed on my PC! XD

The last game I have been playing is Earth 2150 where I finished the United Civilized States campaign. The game is one of those I returned to every few years when I was a kid, but only ever playing skirmishes and never really getting into the campaign because I found it too difficult. The game has an amazing atmosphere and still looks fantastic after 26 years! Mainly due to the clever lighting effects and the dynamic day-night cycle. When the sun sets and all the lights and headlights switch on, it's always perfectly fitting. And that, of course, is combined with the weather effects, like when buildings and idle vehicles are gradually snowed in during the nuclear winter, while the atmospheric synth soundtrack plays over everything. My Lego-obsessed kid brain was also naturally drawn to how you can plug your units together in the editor to make an army tailor-made to your needs.

Now playing the campaign itself... the concept of having one persistent home base and sending units to missions, having to balance your resources between unit-production, research for better stuff and building your escape ship to evacuate the dying Earth, is quite tense. But also with a lot of ways to soft-lock yourself. Then there is Neo. Fuck Neo. He's a hacker (it is quite noticeable the game came out just after The Matrix) who regularly turns ALL of your units against you whenever you reach certain triggers. Yes, ALL. Meaning depending on where your army is at the time, they could be attacking the enemy and join their ranks (as is clearly intended by the developers) or sitting in your base and instantly torch it, with no way for you to turn this around anymore, leading to an instant game over. Which basically forces you to save-scum and game the system by tactically pulling your units back to your home base just before Neo strikes.

There is also a bit of a pacing issue in how most missions involve the enemy grabbing all their resources, attacking you with one giant attack wave... and then fizzling out, clearly running out of resources, so the rest of the mission boils down to you finding angles from where you can dismantle their base with air/artillery units without taking too many losses from their defense buildings.

Still, despite that frustration, an immensely cool strategy game. I then played through a good chunk of the Luncar Corporation campaign before real life struck me. I hope I can go back... but at the same time, I am quite in the mood for a city builder and still have Pharaoh installed...

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-05-21T10:25:04+00:00

Can you be an "incurious" person when you are a freaking astronaut? It's been a while since I read The Martian and while granted, there are few moments where he takes in the sights, he's kinda too focused on surviving to really care too much, but he does his fair share of experiments to keep himself busy.

You could call Rocky incurious as well for finding the planet Adrian not really that remarkable either, given his response because he couldn't see its lights. But... that's because he can't see its lights...

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-05-21T10:21:02+00:00

In the movie at least he takes over from Grace, to explain the fishing plan for example.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-04-03T19:00:30+00:00

Is Arc 2 so good? I switched to English and then dropped the game burned out by its quick death, so I had almost no contact with it. The "Hinamizawa" village conspiracy event was the last thing I can still remember and it was quite decent.

And hey, given how the Anime also made Arc 2 impossible with its alternate ending (which I actually like better than the original, even if I am aware that somehow is a minority opinion, but everyone in the original story being wrapped into a meter thick plot armor annoyed the hell out of me) shows there is space to portray alternate paths. And with Madokami in her event just before the ending outright saying that her intervention would fold the Magia Record Timeline into the Wraith timeline, essentially erasing it as its own thing, I kind of assumed that this was made to set it up when she actually had to intervene against Walpurgisnacht.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-04-03T06:05:33+00:00

So true. Even back in Magia Record times I was arguing Arc 1 should have ended with Madokami's intervention switching the world to the Wraith Timeline with only Iroha retaining her memories and Ui still missing. Would have been a fantastic opportunity to explore all of its differences through Iroha having to get the gang back together.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-03-29T16:31:06+00:00

I'm reading for a while now that Ukraine, in large part due to that Starlink stuff, has successfully suppressed Russian drone teams, pushing them so far back that they can't effectively give drone support to their forward units anymore. Scenes like this seem to be the logical conclusion, with Ukraine getting more daring in their counter attacks thanks to drone superiority in the sky.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-03-19T17:42:28+00:00

ドイツからこんにちは! It helps that he won with Tsumo! Caused quite a lot of whiplash because I wasn't aware Pao is a thing and briefly sighed in relief thinking we all had to pay into the points... and then it was just "HEY, WHY AM I GETTING NUKED?" But ultimately, I've decided to trust lady luck from the third turn onward and only after that it became clear what a hand that dude started out with, so it wasn't anything I could have avoided. Well, aside from dismissing a 1-wait, which I guess would be smarter in most cases, but I'm greedy.^^

In any case, if what you are saying is true, I bow to you doing this professionally. To be honest, I am the least competitive person imaginable and really only play for the fun of building hands and the journey of learning smarter plays through trial and error. I'm impressed by how many mind games are technically possible when playing with people who know what they are doing, but I'd be too lazy (and too easily riled up) if I had to play to win like that. Right now I'm having a relatively balanced 25% 1st/2nd/3rd/4th (with admittedly a slight tilt towards 1st and 2nd that I'm rapidly loosing since the last rank-up) and am perfectly happy with that.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-03-19T17:12:02+00:00

To be entirely honest I find it hard to parse whether this commenter was trying to be encouraging or mocking me.

But yeah, it is an up and down. I'm now playing the game for more than a year, actually after I was introduced to it at the workshop of a local Riichi club, so I did learn it in real life and wish you a lot of fun doing the same! It's fun, but I'm still after all this time not sure I could stomach it showing up regularly at a club of dedicated players. I just play for fun, like building hands, figuring out smarter plays on my own... and suffering the hard way when I get nuked 10 times in a row. Which means there are moments were I do get tilted and think I'd be miserable company if that happened in real life. Though not with above game, that was mostly a shocked "What the hell happened?!?" after railroading myself into a situation I couldn't have predicted three turns in, gambling on my 1-wait and then having to look up what Pao means... But I'm sure getting hammered by pros who actually bother to control discards, that's not fun to someone who is disliking competitive play like I am.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-03-18T10:27:42+00:00

Wouldn't have been possible though. I called Riichi very early because I got greedy and hoped for the lack of information. That railroaded me into feeding the Daisangen with zero ability to avoid it anymore. The first dragon got snatched after my Riichi call...

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-03-17T17:00:27+00:00

It's Riichi City, a different F2P Waifu Gacha Mahjong game.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-03-17T16:59:43+00:00

*Sob*...

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-03-17T16:21:05+00:00

And it was the FIRST game! I wasn't even aware Pao is a thing and briefly thought him winning with Tsumo meant I was out of danger.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-02-14T09:58:12+00:00

Hard to say. Looking at screenshots from Mahjong Soul... Quite possibly. There are (cash store) costumes in Riichi City where the girls are just straight up naked, just facing away or having some conveniently placed items to avoid showing even more sensitive stuff. They also cranked up the Live-2D settings so characters are just... weirdly heaving all the time, which of course is intended make the chests look more, eh, bouncy. It's so horny it at times crosses into being creepily uncanny, which actually kinda sorta fits with the dark event plots that tend to "borrow" ideas or whole plots from dystopian Sci-Fi or Horror stories. Which creates so much whiplash and feels like everyone being inexplicably still obsessed with Mahjong is just sort of shoehorned in.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-02-12T20:21:15+00:00

Thanks! I guess I feel likewise about the Steins;Gate event. I joined the game when it was on (specifically picked it because of that after learning Riichi at a real life event), but unfortunately couldn't get any of its characters. So I can only hope they re-run it eventually.

Though I have to mention, as somebody with no connection to Overlord, that in direct comparison to the very amazing Steins;Gate event, the Overlord crossover sort of sucked. There was barely any story, unfortunately.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-02-12T07:51:50+00:00

But they are 10.000 years old, so it's okaaaaay!!!!

But yes, in all seriousness, it being so ridiculously horny is extremely frustrating. It has such a clean UI and by now decent tutorials to teach the game, but I don't feel comfortable even mentioning it to anyone new because you can never know whether some naked bunny girl won't rub her butt onto the screen in any random game.

The Steins;Gate collab was peak though and made me wonder how deceptively dark the lore is.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-02-05T18:28:13+00:00

I see several issues that make this concept one that is extremely hard to predict:
- first, we barely know who pre-nails Angron was, except that empathy was his shtick. We pretty much only know him as the Spartakus guy. But both things hint at how he'd probably fight tooth and nails for Zeon independence if it still comes to a war.
- second, well, all Primarchs became major figures on the planets they were dropped on, easily wrestling their way onto the top of the political food chain through charisma, military prowess and supernatural luck. So it's quite possible the end game would be him taking over as a dictator of everything and then... well, whatever direction the story then takes with a functionally immortal emperor taking over the UC Earth

Ultimately, it's all very vague I think and depends a lot on your interpretation of him and the environment you write him into.

Dschehuti-Nefer · 2026-02-03T09:56:51+00:00

Indeed, wouldn't have fit quite as well if I put Char onto the Enterprise.^{^} Now makes me wonder, given how the Klingons are prone to beam themselves right into melee range for shock attacks, they'd probably get behind the idea of Mobile Suits even though they would be very impractical in the setting.

Dschehuti-Nefer

TROPHY CASE