I gave Necesse a shot, played in coop with 2 friends, but I wasn't hooked. The pace is a bit too crazy/intense for me.

Tried playing Control this weekend, but I just couldn't get into it. I bought it a while back on one of those "all time high discounts" that GOG occasionally sends out via newsletter, mostly because I was interested in the graphics. And those do look great, especially when you set everything (including RT) to Ultra. But story wise, it just felt too weird for me. I'm clearly not the target audience for this, but I get that people who liked X-Files and similar shows enjoy it a fair bit. The gameplay didn't exactly thrill me either, so I shelved it for now.

Moved on to Kingdom Come: Deliverance based on various recommendations on this forum and elsewhere. This game does look very appealing to me, but there's one big issue that prevents me from enjoying it properly. Motion sickness. For example, every time the protagonist picks up an item (e.g. an apple from the table) he leans in, using the most unnatural head bob animation that I've seen to date. Only the Thief (2014) reboot comes close to this, and I barely managed to play through that. There's also an excessive amount of head bob while walking, running or even just standing still. And when you sit down at a table, the whole goddamn room spins around you. Utterly terrible design.

I tried maxing out the FOV slider and limiting the FPS to 30, since that sometimes helped me in the past. Not sure if it worked here though, and googling the issue revealed that a lot of people have motion sickness problems with this game. There are apparently some mods that can partially address this, so I might try one of those. It's a shame, because the game seems really interesting.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-10-18, 10:33:

Tried playing Control this weekend, but I just couldn't get into it. I bought it a while back on one of those "all time high discounts" that GOG occasionally sends out via newsletter, mostly because I was interested in the graphics. And those do look great, especially when you set everything (including RT) to Ultra. But story wise, it just felt too weird for me. I'm clearly not the target audience for this, but I get that people who liked X-Files and similar shows enjoy it a fair bit. The gameplay didn't exactly thrill me either, so I shelved it for now.

TOO MANY DEATHS you have to go through to go past an obstacle / enemy.
Going back to certain zones and you have to kill new people again and again, making it super boring.
I didn't like it either.

It was boring even after enabling cheating.
Yes, there is the option in the system menu; no, it's there in plain sight and not hidden. This tells a story by itself.

Hey, I LOVED Control! And it's more like Twin Peaks than The X-Files! I mean, the whole LIGHT BULB thing and what not 😉 Plus it's interwoven with Alan Wake story-wise.

Here's another positive review for control. Good game, unique story and atmosphere.

mtest001 wrote on 2025-10-17, 18:48:

I gave Necesse a shot, played in coop with 2 friends, but I wasn't hooked. The pace is a bit too crazy/intense for me.

That's one of the things I like about it. 😜

Currently playing with my brother-in-law, having fun. We're moving right along. Trying to get my wife to play now. 🤣

Finally completed Elex after several false starts over the years.

Positives: A huge, interesting world with lots of different regions, fairly decent graphics (for the time), a good variety of party members

Negatives: Script is fairly awful, missions are bland (go here, kill these things, take this package to bob), numerous essential characters who can't be killed, early game is incredible punishing and difficult but once you start to level up a lot of the game mechanics are simply hidden from you or explained incredibly poorly (what difference does +10 poison resistance make?), you can try approaching the quests in a number of different ways but it all boils down to hack and slash and shoot to solve things.

Final levels (attacking Xacor) ended up being pathetically easy - I had a fully upgraded War bow, unlocked the 'burst' fire option and you effectively get a 5 x 120dp area-affect shotgun-bow which is insanely overpowered. The entire Alb army fell in about 30 seconds and after what seemed like 5 minutes of exposition the final bad guy took two shots (so a good 1000dp) at close range to fall. Fairly disappointing.

I'm in two minds whether to start Elex II... it's clearly the prettier game and the improved jetpack mechanics are interesting (played about an hour of the game when it was first released)... but I'm not sure I want to go back to Magalan.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-10-20, 04:10:

Currently playing with my brother-in-law, having fun. We're moving right along. Trying to get my wife to play now. 🤣

Wow you seemed to have gone very far already, how many hours have you played?

revolstar wrote on 2025-10-18, 16:17:

Hey, I LOVED Control! And it's more like Twin Peaks than The X-Files! I mean, the whole LIGHT BULB thing and what not 😉 Plus it's interwoven with Alan Wake story-wise.

The story isn't bad in itself.
I'll finish the game eventually.

megatron-uk wrote on 2025-10-20, 07:42:

Finally completed Elex after several false starts over the years.

I'm still in the false start phase with Elex - I kinda-sorta got into it not long after release but I lost interest when I reached the desert. The jetpack was the most interesting thing about it I decided, everything else was quite bland. I read years ago that Piranha Bytes had the option to go back and make another Gothic game (after losing the rights for a long time) so a part of me wished they'd spent their time on that instead of Elex, but the magic was long gone by that stage it seems so perhaps best that they didn't.

But then Chronicles Of Myrtana came along and I had my Gothic 4 anyway.

mtest001 wrote on 2025-10-20, 09:33:

StriderTR wrote on 2025-10-20, 04:10:

Currently playing with my brother-in-law, having fun. We're moving right along. Trying to get my wife to play now. 🤣

Wow you seemed to have gone very far already, how many hours have you played?

I have just over 150 hours across two worlds. My single player pre-release world, and now this post release 1.0 world I'm running as a dedicated server for family. 😀

I'm currently busy with the Master Levels for Doom II. I've been actively playing Doom and its various mods for the last 5 years now, but never got around to the master levels until recently.

Thanks to the Steam release of old Doom, the master levels are in playable order. That said it clearly wasn't designed this way, and so you get ammo wayyyy too fast.

When I'm done I'll probably replay in Nightmare.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Some small playing, but mostly testing out Unreal Classic with Rage Pro.

I just finished System Shock 2 on hard.

The navy sailor path is my favorite because I can hack my way through every keypad, container, and security system.

I finished the System Shock 2023 remake a few month ago and it was really a nice experience. Highly recommended.

Started playing command and conquer remake. have had it in my steam library for a while!

Playing lots and lots of Stargunner. For some reason I keep coming back to this game from time to time, partially due to nostalgia as I played it a lot on my first PC (the registered version was released in a covermount CD so it was somehow popular among PC gamers at the time), but also the game is very fun and challenging if you want to beat it without save scumming.
Finished all episodes in both normal and hard difficulties, saving in between levels and right before each boss, now I’m trying to play on normal saving only between levels.
Another game which I played recently was the windows version of Death Rally (the classic one, available for free on steam). This is another game that I keep coming back because it’s so fun. Finished it twice on normal, but the huge amount of rubber banding (even the crappy vagabond car can reach you when the CPU is using it) kind of turned me off from finishing on hard.
Those are two of my favorite Apogee games of all time, and luckily for everyone, both are available for free.

This game doesn't need an introduction, surely you all know it!

Started playing Dark Souls for the first time. Specifically, the Xbox 360 version in glorious 720p @ 30 FPS, with frequent drops into the low 20s. Yeah, that doesn't exactly help with the already high difficulty level. EDIT - I ended up getting the remaster on Steam, and restarting my playthrough there. The Xbox 360 version had some nasty sub ~15 FPS drops in certain places, which made the game nearly unplayable for me. Hats off to people who actually managed to complete the game on that console.

Anyway, as a big fan of the Gothic/Risen games, I do understand when developers don't exactly hold the player's hand, but Dark Souls dials that up to 11. The tutorial basically amounts to: "Here's what each button on the controller does. Good luck!". And the manual has no particularly useful info either. I tried going in blindly at first, but the complete lack of information about even the most basic things quickly made me look up several guides on the internet. With a bit of help, I made a warrior build, took the master key gift, and unequipped a few pieces of armor to increase running/dodging speed. That made things a bit better, but it's still far from being a smooth experience.

I should mention that his is my first proper Souls game. I did play a bit of Nioh on my PS4 years ago, but I'm not sure if that actually counts. IIRC, I made it through maybe one third of that game, before bowing out due to a sudden difficulty spike. And honestly, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to finish Dark Souls either, but there is some weird satisfaction in making even a little progress in these kind of games. We'll see how things go.