Saturday Morning Gaming: Gaming Frugally 2
Last year, at the beginning of the first lockdown, we talked about Free (for real) games. Those games in the post are still worth checking out but there are new free games for you to tinker with as you wait for this interminable lockdown to end.
GOG.com has a bunch of games on their free page that weren’t on there last time.
Loria is an homage/rip-off of Warcraft II. If you miss old-schooly RTS (but don’t want to give Blizzard money), you should check this out.
Symphonia is a delightful 2D platformer. It’s short and fun and the controls made sense to *ME*, but the reviews are full of people complaining about them. Your mileage, of course, may vary but *I* thought the game was charming. (And, hey, it’s free.)
Samorost 1 is a 2021 remaster of a flash point/click adventure/puzzle game from the mid-oughts. A nice little zen game.
Steam has a ton of free games but it feels like most of them are either Free To Play (Pay To Win) or First Hit’s Free! games. But there are exceptions.
The Hidden Room is an escape room/puzzle game. I haven’t played it but I *LOVED* the old “The Room” series (with the puzzle boxes) and so I’ll check this one out when I am able to stop playing Diablo 2.
Dagon by HP Lovecraft is less a game and more of a visual novel. I admit: I went through a horror/suspense phase as a kid (tore through Stephen King like you wouldn’t believe) and wandered through HP Lovecraft and found his stuff kinda boring. They were just stories about people talking about creepy stuff that happened in the past! And it wasn’t even that exciting I mean, say what you will about IT, but it alternated between “what happened then” and “what happened now”. I specifically remember reading Dagon and being irritated. The guy went to bed, heard some creepy noises, and there were weird footprints outside when he got up the courage to look the next morning? BOR-ING. Now I am older and understand more of what Lovecraft was going for. It’s horror for older people rather than teenagers. The story brags about how you can beat it in a half hour. I probably wouldn’t want to play it before bed, though…
Mostly what I’m playing is Diablo 2, though. I’ve reached the point where it’s more of a surprise to do a loot run and not get a unique item than it is to get one. (There are a lot of them! And most of them get turned into Steel Golems!) and I’m still having a blast with the game. WHEN THE SERVERS AREN’T DOWN.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Free is Not Always Clear” by cogdogblog. Used under creative commons license.)
Blame Pindleskin!
Word on the street is that the Diablo II beta testers were playing the game normally, rather than doing magic find runs. The servers were sufficient for the number of players they’re seeing now, but not for the play style. New game, kill Pindleskin, check for loot, end game. Every 20 seconds they’re generating a new map, and resaving a character.Report
Connecting to Battle.net. Position in Queue: 299.
Press escape to play offline.Report
10 minutes to get in.
That’s better than not getting in.Report
Yes, I figured out your current mental state from the phrase “…when I am able to stop playing Diablo 2”. I mean, you gotta love’em, a 20-year-old game gets refurbished and they’ve got to post security along the velvet ropes.Report
Oh, one thing I should say: If you’re on the Diablo 2s and wishing that you had a buddy who had a level 60 farming necro who would keep an eye out for particular items for ya, send me an email (it’s up there in the author info).
I get stuff and sell it a lot (or turn it into golems) and I can’t help but think “that’s a dang shame” for half of them.
I know that there’s probably a handful of people out there who would love to play with some of these toys that are just lying fallow.Report
I finally finished normal mode. This is the original game, not Resurrected. I’m surprised at how much they dialed it back in the expansion. After dying constantly in Act IV, Act V felt like a victory lap. I died four times: Once to a random elite, twice because I didn’t notice the poison after the second wave of pre-Baal fights, and once because Lister. Unlike Diablo, who kept killing me with his blast attack before the unresponsive combat engine would allow me to move, Baal just didn’t put out enough damage to pose a credible threat.
I’m surprised at how little action there was in the genre-defining action RPG. You walk around and click on enemies to attack them, and that’s about it. Sometimes it helps to reposition yourself, but aside from that the outcome of combat is almost entirely determined by gear, build, and level.
I’m not really inclined to go on to nightmare mode. That’s enough Diablo II for me. I’ll probably give IV a try after it’s had some time to bake, though.Report
Yeah, Act V always makes me think of Galaga. It’s all about quantity of enemies, not quality. I do really hate Baal in hell mode, though, but mainly due to the amount of damage he can take. You need to be customizing your character the whole game to be able to deal out that much damage. It’s made worse by the increasing elemental resistances in nightmare and hell.Report
There is a criticism of games that I absolutely understand and it is a criticism that fits here:
“The game gets really good after you put 20 hours into it.”
“Who in the hell has time to play a game that isn’t really good until you put 20 hours into it?”
When I was playing on Normal with my necro, I was dying every level. Multiple times! In Nightmare, my build finally started to click. I strolled through Acts II, III, and IV and am only starting to slow down in V.
And the game has started to be *REALLY* fun. Like “I remember 2001” fun.Report
“You need to be customizing your character the whole game to be able to deal out that much damage.”
This was my criticism of “FTL”. Like, there’s all different kinds of ways to play the game! And 95% of them will get you straight trucked by the end boss. And if you build for the end boss you’ll probably be done with that build about halfway through the game, and the end boss build is massively OP for anything else.Report
I started writing a comment to this but realized that it probably needed to be Saturday’s post.Report
I’m still taking a break from video games, but I’ve been hearing good things about Metroid Dread, so I will probably be getting that next month.
My wife and I played a game of Planet Apocalypse over the weekend and got trashed, but we think we have a new strategy to beat the setup the we used.
I also revisited the Lord of the Rings Living Card Game.
I finally broke down and bought Gloom Haven: Jaws of the Lion. I’ll probably give that a try later this weekend or next weekend.Report
Jaws of the Lion! Envy!
Our in-person Gloomhaven game was well kiboshed by the Pandemic but the vidya game version releases Wednesday!
I might even stop playing Diablo to try it out!Report