Games I’ve been playing – October to December 2018

My attempts to set monthly gaming goals for myself didn’t work out again. This was in large part because the last time I set one of those I fell into a bout of depression that left me with little desire  to do anything, even playing games.

Then I got distracted by other games and decided to just stop setting the goals as I would just be repeating the same goals over and over and not achieving any of them. I can just be stubborn that way.

I figured out that instead of repeating this cycle which only lead to more frustration perhaps a different approach might be better. I will just do a monthly report of what I have been playing and how far I got into the games in question.

This, like pretty much everything else in this blog, will be purely for myself. Probably more so than anything else as I don’t think it will be of much interest to anyone else reading it.

It does have a goal besides just self-indulgence though: my hope is that with this kind of post it might just give me a sense of progression with these games. Maybe even a sense of actually chipping away at the endless backlog too.

If I ever get crazy enough (unlikely) I might even check back later to see what I was actually playing in a month or do a tally at the end of the year to see which game I spent the most time with.

For now I will just worry about trying to keep track of what I’ve played in a given month. This one will probably be a bit longer since I want to start from where I last set my monthly goals.

Without further ado, this is what I have been playing in these last months…

Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines

I guess this won’t surprise anyone given how I have been doing a Let’s Play of the game here. I started playing it again because some of my friends were playing it and there is a half-joke that if someone else mentions the game we get the urge of playing it again. That was certainly true in my case.

My goal was to finish it a long time ago but depression and other things happened so it didn’t come to pass. Hopefully I can  finish it in early 2019.

I am not too far from where I last wrote about it. The last thing I did was complete Grout’s Mansion which leaves me with enough material for just one more post in the series. This means I need to get far ahead enough to have more material before resuming my writing on the Let’s Play.

Yakuza Kiwami 2

This is another game I meant to have finished by now but it didn’t happen. I am at the last chapter but I am trying to finish some side content first.

Right now I am trying to finish the Bouncer missions which is taking far longer than I anticipated. There is a ton of them, each with a 3 difficulty levels. At least they are fast enough to do and I even lowered the overal game difficulty just to complete them faster. After those there are still the Majima Construction, some baseball to buy two skill tomes, finishing up the Coliseum and dealing with the Amons. Once I am done with all those I will go back to the main story.

Oh, there is also the Karaoke which is giving me far more trouble than any other game in the series. I’ve been doing those a bit every time I play but so far no luck. If I can’t get a 90+ score on it before I finish everything else then I will just leave it as something to do after finishing the main story.

Warriors Orochi 4

This was a complete impulse purchase due to a friend of mine streaming it. I don’t regret it though as I have been meaning to check the series for a while and this turned out to be a pretty fun game.

I finished all the main stories in this  game as well as the side ones. All I have left to do is getting some achievements and  finishing the DLCs stories. Even after that I might still launch the game from time to time when I need some mindless fun that is quick to get in and get out.

Fallout 4

Besides being one of one of my “comfort food” of games there has been some huge changes and developments in the modding scene that I wanted to check out. The downside of it has been figuring out what I can replace, remove and what is still safe to use. Due to that I lost a few saves due to corruption and decided to put it back on hold.

I think I might have nailed down the culprits but haven’t had the patience to go back to find out.

Danganronpa

This is another one of those games I’ve been meaning to check out for a long time but finally took the plunge this year. The story has been better than I expected (and I was already expecting it to be good) with a good mixture of horror and humor. It is also fun to play amateur sleuth and figure out how each murder happened, who is the culprit and the motivations behind it.

I only completed two trials so far and haven’t gone back to the game. Part of it is because one of the buttons in my controller is kinda of broken and I don’t remember if it is one of the buttons I need for trials. Since I rather not find the hard way and relearn to play with a mouse and keyboard would be a pain it is on hold until I can buy a new controller.

Monster Hunter World

I have a bit of an odd relationship with Monster Hunter games. On one hand hunting down a monster, figuring its patterns and taking it down is pretty fun. On the other hand the hunts can take quite a bit of time and having to do it several times to craft new gear can get tedious.

It is because of those reasons that I tend to get through the game through fits and spurts of progress just to stop playing altogether for a few months. Unecessary to say  this makes progress extremely slow.

So slow in fact that I have the game since it’s original release on the PS4 and haven’t finished the story yet. My latest progress has been taking down the Pink Rathian. It took me four tries to kill the dang thing and it was one of the hardest and most intense fights I’ve had in a video-game. It is not one I am looking to repeat any time soon.

After that I got a new area unlocked and a bunch of new monster to hunt down. But it will have to wait until the next time I got the patience to play the game again. XD

Two Point Hospital

This is another game I bought a while ago but haven’t played until recently when I got in the mood to play something that was more about building and managing.

I knew this was a spiritual sucessor to Theme Hospital and yet it still surprised me how so much of it still felt like the original game. It even has some nice quality of life improvements like being able to copy and move whole rooms which can make reorganizing the hospitals much easier once they start to get too crowded.

I got so much into it that I didn’t play anything else  for a few days. In fact I had to stop because I wanted to play other games too. XD

I don’t remember at which hospital I stopped though… It was at a point where I had to start hiring surgeons, I think. I will eventually get back to it too, hopefully without getting too addicted to it. XD

Super Smash Bros Ultimate

I’ve only been able to get my hands on this game a few days ago so I haven’t made much progress.

So far I like it. I am terrible at fighting games but Smash’s simplicity of controls make it fun for me as I can just focus on the fight instead of “Oh, this would be a good moment to use that special move”.

I am not too sure how I feel about the  World of Light though. On one hand it is nice that the game has a sort of story mode again (it didn’t have one in the Wii U, which was my first Smash Bros). On the other hand some of those fights are stupidly hard due to the gimmicks of levels and spirits.

Spirits is another thing I am on the fence about. I am not much a fan of collect-a-tons like those but it can provide another layer of tactics if you know what you are fighting against. For now I am just rolling with it before forming a more complete opinion.

Octopath Traveler

Octopath Traveler is a classic example of my ADD at work. I bought it near release, loved the game, played a bit then got distracted by something else and didn’t touch it again until recently.

I am trying to make a better effort at playing it now, with the intention of making a bit of progress every night. Specially since I found out that it is a pretty good game to play while laying on the bed (I usually prefer to play Switch games docked).

At the moment of this writing I only unlocked 5 of the 8 characters and unlocking each one has been very fun. Not only because their stories are pretty well written but because each of their Path Skills adds something new to the game. Some times it is even a way to complete some side quest.

If I can keep this up I might be able to finish it in a few months (famous last words).

That is what I’ve been playing lately. Hope everyone has a great new year! 🙂