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I'm playing it on Game Pass. I'd say $10-$15 (I'm currently on the $9.99 plan) a month is a pretty great value for those like me who want to play as many games as humanly possible. I think they still have the 1 month for $1 deal for new subscribers.

im excited to play the campaign of battlefield 5 im glad its free

After skipping the last two leagues, I'm back to playing Path of Exile. Even in its current bloated state, it's still the best ARPG out there.

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Seriously? They are already re-releasing FF7 Remake and adding more crap to it?

Square Enix is a shadow of its former self. A little child lost in the weeds.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Is it a re-release? Or the other HALF of the game that wasn't part of that earlier release?


I don't know. I didn't buy it, just seems a few people were frustrated with the length of the game.

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

It is a re-release with "updated graphics" and an extra mission where you play as Yuffie in Midgar.

So basically, it's Square Enix shaking a can: "alms for the poor?"

Maybe they need money to finish the rest of the game?

Oh wow. That's not cool =\

Just got back into Fallout 1, last time I rage quit because a bug ruined my playthrough. Can't wait ti get back to the Brotherhood of Steel, because that questline was the bomb.

Nice, lemme know how that goes. I've been meaning to go back and play the old ones (I found the series with Fallout 3).

Enjoying the Elite DLC, although it's tempered by not being able to play the main new stuff in VR.


Little gallery

The scavenging loop seems to be the way to upgrade your kit, so been doing a bit of that. (Scan planet with funky new, slightly broken, bio scanner. Trek down to site enjoying the pretty. Fight off anyone nearby. Cut panels off things with an arc cutter.)

Pretty simple in the main, but pretty chill. And should mean I survive better at the settlements, which are the main addition, and a lot more involved. (I have survived to date, but I've mainly been doing simple delivery missions. While somehow managing to anger the security guards by jet-packing over them while they're trying to scan me . I got away, but my ship had some holes in it...)

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Pitchforks are out in some parts over performance and networking instability (very neg reviews on Steam etc). Would expect the latter to settle down at least.

(Also they angered the old school players by changing the UI. And the proc gen surfaces. And by making them park up their end game super-ships to help the servers )

Reckon it'll pull through though. Elite is like a doughty old labrador

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Meanwhile, on the less dangerous side, I've been playing these games lately. Whenever Steam has some good sales in a row, my productivity on other projects plummets.

This has three games, Isoland 1, 2, 3, and they're all delightful fun.



I'm also playing a game called Founder's Fortune, which seems to be a solid cross between the game Banished and The Sims. I've logged just under 100 hours in the past month:



And, with a friend's coaxing, I'm back into Stardew Valley, with its huge updates and additions from a few months ago. I have nearly 500 hours in this game over the past three years or so.

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So I've been easing into the more combative missions in these 'wild west' settlements.

That's my big blue horse in the distance there. And it is BIIIIIG. (Even though there's not a huge amount of interaction between the ship world and the running around one, it is very cool to run back under the cover of your giant 'mothership' when taking fire )

It turns out that just driving around in your buggy, tagging and zapping scavengers, is a totally viable strategy. So I didn't end up using my new plasma sniper and automatic that much. (As fun as it is hopping around dusty roof tops, identifying patrols by their callouts...why not just get in an OP machine and spot them on the scanner?)

They did take its shields down fairly easily if in pairs or more, so it wasn't totally plain sailing. And the final survivor actually took it out entirely. But it turns out he was stuck in a wall, and completely invulnerable...

So I got in my big blue horse, eyeballed the wall from the air, and got him with the splash damage from some dumbfire missiles. Bugs be damned, I was going to finish that mission

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I'm definitely enjoying this addition to the: 'Have space ship, will do mercenary work' game. But still not sure whether I'd recommend it to others, or whether it's got legs, right now.

Take the scavenging gameplay for example. It is definitely a kleptomaniac's dream. If you help out an abandoned settlement (by restarting its power source, or chasing off scavengers), you can help yourself to all its loot before the population returns. (This makes as much sense as loot in any RPG it seems ).

But it's almost too large a pinyata at that point. I've been round a few now hoovering up everything, and it's atmospheric in the dark with your torch, and with the very slight risk that scavengers might return (or you might run out of battery packs while arc-cutting into cupboards and over-charging doorways... and die in some giant warehouse in the middle of nowhere...). But it does feel like it should be interspersed with another strand of gameplay.

Like, I'll keep doing it, because I do want the blueprints stashed away in a box. But yeah, it does feel more like shopping in an abandoned supermarket than scavenging on the fly, I guess.

Pretty cool 80's action heroes update for Black Ops & Warzone, features new operators; John McClane & John Rambo.

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Ohhh damn, finally time to buy RDR2...



(The same guy did a great mod for GTAV. It's a bit scrubby, due to the tricks he uses to make it run at all, and he opted for classic controller rather than adding motion controllers, as a deliberate choice, which makes me sad :/. But having these worlds accessible in VR is properly nuts )

i know this game has bad reviews it still hasnt stopped me buying this game cause i love cats and this game is perfect for me i loved its so its an amazing game

^^large ship in large place^^

Ok so I found a variant of the 'loot the giant settlement' loop that's a bit more fun.

Got sent to repower a settlement that wasn't just offline, but on fire as well. That means there are electric sparks and flames everywhere that can damage you, making some passageways impassable etc. The solution, of finding decompression panels and starving the fires of oxygen, is pretty straightforward, but it adds some pleasing little aspects:

• The indoor panels are easier to use, but they mean navigating the burning building to find them.
• The rooftop gear is easy enough to find, but cutting into them is so noisy that you're forever straining to hear if a scavenger crew is getting drop-shipped in nearby.

Doing this at night, with flickering settlement lights looking disturbingly like search party torches, is actually properly tense. Even though, of course, the scavengers didn't show this time in the end . (Despite me having an optional mission to kill them off if they did). But they have done before, and they will do again...

That underlying tension plays out for the POI crash sites too, where scavengers can also drop in, and it all makes a certain sense of the different suit loadouts. (You need to use the engineer suit with the cutting tool to scavenge, but it's a lot less capable in a fight than the dedicated combat version.)

The tensest of all though is probably trying to infiltrate an occupied settlement for some sneaky espionage, theft, or assassination. I'm only just gearing up to do these properly, without the safety net of the Alpha beneath me, but it's already pretty sweaty-palmed. Just casing joints, stealing data, and quickly revoking a hacked ID before a security scan provides plenty of opportunities for misadventure

Minor adventures in Pinkland [gallery]



Again, still don't know if I'd recommend it as yet. (The launch week issues are fairly profound, even if I'm mainly powering through it all with some hefty kit and a bit of bug-fu )

But as someone with a small fleet of fancy ships already (and some knowledge of how to get the best out of the game's worst bits...), I'm finding it all a solid and fine addition to the game

Ok so I've bumbled into two more ways scavenging can play out, which are a bit more than just a 'shopping mall' free for all...



In this exciting screenshot I am hiding in a dark industrial building.

That's because I had a mission to rescue a chemical sample from a cupboard. Which meant ransacking lots of cupboards in the dark, and taking everything I found regardless. But it was nice to have a focus for the kleptomania...

Unfortunately some glass vials rattled while I was doing this. It turns out that signalled a large unfriendly vessel, dropping off some large unfriendly scavengers.

Scans confirmed that the guys prowling the street were way above my pay-grade. And then they blew up my moon buggy. So this was now slightly tense.

By the time I'd scouted for alternate exits to arc cutter my way out of, their patrol had shifted streets. So I jet-packed to a safe roof, superman-skipped over to my ship, and came back to blow them up with dumbfire missiles . (Not all in one go, as it turns out some of them scattered and hid in time. So I got a rude awakening when sallying out again. But thanks to night vision, and their torch light being visible, I dealt with the rest in an ungentlemanly missile-based fashion too )

I rescued the stash, completing the mission, but then my personal project hit a wall. I'd wanted to steal some precious plans from the industrial data port, to improve my suit. But of course, in this abandoned settlement, the power was off. And I'd used all of my batteries cutting through doors by this point. My time was up.

I'd have to try a different approach. Head to a living settlement, and steal some data from under their noses instead...

I'll tell this one in picture form



Little image story

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Ok so like, neither aspect is super novel. (Find the loot cupboard / steal objects from under people's noses).

But I do like how this all plays out. And how there's a basic backdrop to it all, in that if I piss off one faction too much (be they local industrialists, or local scavenging crews), it can be hell to pay down the line

Shame the DLC's getting murdered in Steam reviews over performance and such. I think they've done a pretty good job on the actual game

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Bonus gallery of other people's exploration shots



(IE what the planets look like at their best, when the proc gen doesn't do something totally horrendous to them )

new gameplay trailer for horizon forbidden west

Resident Evil Village - 8/10
Such a cool dark fantasy, though it seems silly to try to shoehorn a narrative connection to previous Resident Evil games when they've veered this far off the beaten path.

Hallow knight is probably the best video game ever, I was also recently playing dark souls 3 and just was way too hard when i got to the swamp and i lost interest because the novelty faded as well.


If you're looking for pure $$$ value of games vs. time playing them, then the dark souls series will not disappoint.