(no subject)

[thedarlingone]

extremely brief video game reviews:

* skyrim is impressively dogshit. maybe it was good in 2011? idk man i had never played a video game in my life as of 2011. i played an hour of skyrim and did not enjoy any aspect of it. refunded.

* slime rancher is a game with an extremely cute artstyle, i played a bit of the demo. i do not enjoy the sorts of games where you have to manage resources in order to keep your animals happy and producing more resources. if you do enjoy that sort of game, check out the slime rancher demo on steam.

* i did about fifteen minutes of trying to parry in elden ring, could not get it, and decided i will refund that game also and pick it up again in a few years when it's cheaper and i have considerably more controller muscle memory.

* then i booted up boyfriend dungeon and spent like four hours there. that is such a moreish game. you date were-weapons, do little multiple-choice conversations with them as per standard dating sim convention, take their weapon forms into a roguelite dungeon crawler to level up your relationship, go on more dates and repeat. i did Not expect to enjoy something where the combat genre name involves the words "realtime bullet hell" but i'm actively loving it and apparently fairly good at it? like i am actively planning to buy another game in the same combat genre (hades, currently $7.50 on sale) as soon as the skyrim refund clears.

next plans: probably won't be streaming again till after christmas, probably pick up jedi fallen order again at that time. i'm still having a shitton of fun hanging out with friends in stream chat and will be delighted if any of y'all happen to show up as well (that's why i keep posting the links)

Comments

[teratornis]

I feel you on Skyrim, I tried to get into it three or four times, and never made it more than a couple of hours. It's so. . . aimless.

I keep hoping to make it to one of the streams, but I'm always at work when I see the posts. 😔 Someday, though, hopefully.

[thedarlingone]

Hopefully someday! I've usually been live for at least 3 hours at a time, and yesterday I wound up doing about 6 hours, so definitely feel free to check in those timeframes if I'm still streaming. (More than 6 hours is unlikely because I do have a bad back and sitting up to game is a Process.)

[teratornis]

I'll definitely keep that in mind!

[viridian5]

There was a game I played ages ago where I wandered it aimlessly, doing things as I came across them, while my gamer friend instinctively went at it more systematically and did far better at getting weapons and accomplishing things. Maybe Skyrim is like that.

[thedarlingone]

Well, I love dicking around aimlessly in an open world, so that wasn't my main problem with it (although I actually didn't get far enough in the first hour to access the open world part). It just feels badly made: no camera auto-movement in conversation cutscenes, wildly oversensitive manual camera movement even at minimum setting, no combat lock-on, no interact indicator until your cursor is directly on the interactable object at close range, I couldn't figure out how to access my inventory to use a healing item when the game told me to... It's very high-poly (I think I had the 2016 remaster but still), but it feels to me like perhaps the graphics and the relative novelty of an open world in 2011 distracted people from how crappy the moment-to-moment gameplay is.

Or my standards are too high because I'm from 2025 and have only played a few of the most universally acclaimed games of the past decade and a half. That's also very possible!