jdodson1

Joined 01/23/2012

I'm an Engineer and built the video game community Cheerful Ghost and text based mini-MMO Tale of the White Wyvern.

2728 Posts

Greetings Ghosts and Elves,

Now that presents time is upon us I was wondering what everyone is playing? Before you go I’ll dish up a side of ham and Borderlands 3. Originally I picked this up on sale on PC and quite enjoyed it but solidly changed my gaming focus to the XBox when the Series X came. Recently Gearbox released a Borderlands 3 Legendary Edition that features the base game plus all DLC (base game disc, DLC code on paper) and I’ve been playing that here and there. I also got Forza Horizon 4 for cheap during Black Friday. Needless to say these are more than enough to tide me over plus the incredible backlog I have already (the woe, the lamentation).

What are you playing? Also if you want, dish up what you’ve been watching too. I’ll put my watching in the comments.


I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and also drop the note of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Turkey Day marathon. This year the extra bonus is that they are dropping the titles of the movies they are riffing for Season 13! So far the new announced movies in Season 13 are:

Munchie, Beyond Atlantis, Robot Wars, Santo and the Treasure of Dracula & Doctor Mordrid.

There are some real gems in there and I can’t wait to see how they riff Munchie!


jdodson gives this a solid "Rad" on the Ghost Scale
This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.
jdodson gives this a "Rad" on the Ghost Scale
This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.
It's a pretty well tried release strategy to release a main line shooter entry and then drop a gaggle of smaller DLC with it or one big story game alongside it using the engine of the game you just made. With the Wolfenstein franchise Besthesda drops one extra follow up story campaign alongside the main entry and Wolfenstein Youngblood was the follow up campaign that launched after New Order.

Originally I picked up Wolfenstein Youngblood on Switch and while it's not the optimal place to play it if you want the best graphics, it's a solid port worthy of the game. That said, when Wolfenstein: Alt History Collection (which contains each game in the new Wolfenstein series) was on XBox for cheap, I picked it up to play Youngblood and finally completed the main story portion of the game.

Wolfenstein Youngblood takes everything from the previous Wolfenstein games and builds on it to add some extra game mechanics in terms of character and weapon upgrades to give the series a new take. Whereas the new mechanics are interesting, they aren't very much fun. Early on when playing the game I didn't put much thought into the upgrade system until I hit a brick wall in terms of enemies being so hard I couldn't progress. When that happened I felt the game was forcing me to upgrade things I wasn't sure would make progression easier. In the end a combination of weapon and character upgrades along with staying ONLY on the designated mission path was the ticket to making progress in the game. Youngblood has a hub world system where you can veer off the mission path and if you do, the increased enemy difficulty will obliterate you unless you are some kind of shooter Godess.

Besides the upgrade system, the actual shooter part of the game is top notch. The guns feel great and I enjoyed each one quite a bit. Each enemy has a weakness to a particular gun type which forced me to use different guns beyond just camping out on the shotgun or machine gun.

Youngbloods story is about as good as anything from the main games but there isn't much of it, which is a shame. There is plenty of game here I just feel that the story that ties it together is pretty sparse and I wanted quite a bit more of it. According to Bethesda, Youngblood will the the springboard for the series right into Wolfenstein 3 which should be the conclusion of this new Wolfenstein game trilogy. I don't want to spoil any of the story, but what they did set up in Youngblood should make for a great ending to the Wolfenstein series.

While Youngblood isn't the best entry in the series, there is enough fun to be had to keep things interesting until the end. There is quite a bit more to play after the main campaign is over but I don't imagine i'll finish the remaining missions now that the story is over. If you haven't played any of the new Wolfenstein games I heartily recommending picking up the Alt History Collection.


Wanted to wish everyone a very Happy Halloween! This year I had a get together at my place with some friends and to celebrate this spook season we played co-op of the original Doom. It was fun to play Doom with friends and if you wanted upgrade things a bit you could play one of these Halloween / Horror themed Doom WADS reviewed by The Dean of Doom himself. I'm a sucker for the original Doom campaign but there are some really incredible WADs that in a lot of ways are better than the original campaigns but require you to be a bit of a Doom expert to complete.

☠️👻

Tangerine Nightmare: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/tn
Wormwood: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110060-wormwood-2-halloween-maps/?tab=comments#comment-2041472


Steam Deck is the new Valve hardware that will play your Steam library on the go using Linux and a modified version of Wine. Because of that some games don't run perfectly and Valve has a new system to let you know what games work and what games might need some tweaking.

"Introducing Deck Verified: See at a glance how your Steam games run on Deck. "


Happy Halloween everyone! I watched this recent Digitial Foundry breakdown of the recent Diablo II remake and all the various console versions and wanted to share it and kick off a broader public discussion on your thoughts about it. Seems like the general consensus is the game is a great version of the classic game, however, some miss the quality of life improvements present in more modern games such as Diablo III. It's an odd thing to think given folks were trashing Diablo III because it wasn't more like Diablo II.

I've recently been in the process of moving and finally landed into my new apartment so I haven't had as much time to play Diablo II as I would have otherwise, but so far I really love the work they've done with it. I'm curious if Blizzard will do more with Diablo II in terms of expansions or new content or if they will save all of that for Diablo IV? Also wondering how the reception of the Diablo II remaster might effect development of Diablo IV? Also... will we get Diablo IV with all the problems Blizzard is having right now?


RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of the best sim games of all time. As such it has a huge cult following and because of that was the first request fans made of NoClip for their retro documentary series "Greatest Hits." It goes over a lot of the games history all the way to it's modern incarnations and would be perfect except they weren't able to land an interview with the series creator Chris Sawyer.

If you love RollerCoaster Tycoon and are itching to play it there is a great open source project Open RollerCoaster Tycoon that is one of the best ways to play it on PC, Mac or Linux. If you don't have a PC and are mostly on your Smartphone or Tablet, RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic is a great port of RollerCoaster Tycoon and it's sequel including all of the expansions.

https://openrct2.org/

"In our brand new series Greatest Hits, we celebrate the legacy of RollerCoaster Tycoon by exploring its original design and talking to the people holding the torch today. RCT was chosen by a subset of our patrons - to pick the next game, consider joining them."


The MiSTer is an open-source project that emulates consoles and various other retro hardware via FPGA. FPGA means that it's pretty original hardware accurate emulation and it's similar to RetroPIE in that it's open source meaning anyone can create a hardware kit on your own to play or sell. I've heard really good things how well MiSTer runs and as such wanted to share this review by everyones favorite Jesus made entirely of Metal.


Seems like I'm posting a few Digital Foundry videos this morning. With that, has anyone picked up and played Skyward Sword on Switch yet? I've heard the controls are a mixed bag but overall the game is quite good. I didn't get this game on the Wii but am curious if it's worth coming back to on Switch?


I played Super Star Wars on the Super Nintendo a lot. A lot. It's one of the most fun Star Wars video games I've played and it's notoriously "Nintendo hard." I never really thought about it as a youth but when I come back to it now I do. If you practice at it you can beat it start to finish in one life, which I could do, but it takes a lot of effort to develop that. That all said, Super Star Wars and the subsequent two games are an example of fantastic Star Wars video games in a very crowded space. Lately, the quality of Star Wars games has gone up but it wasn't always so.