Currently Phantasmagoria,

at this time a soft horror story, the house is not a house, it is a castle!

I finished a few days ago The Curse of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. The first one is a replay and I keep my opinion, it's a regular game, don't get me wrong, the graphics and puzzles are impressive, but the story is meh instead of the first two. The final is very short.


And about Maniac Mansion, wow, i started a lot of times in my childhood but never passed from the lock door and now i finished one of the possible ends and i have to admit the game is incredible. The amount of possibilities you have, i was starting new games with different boys when discovered you can´t do concrete things. I have to replay it to see other ends.

Regards!

Picked up Star Wars Pinball for my Switch for half-off during the Christmas sale. I already put in quite a few hours. I'm liking it a lot. Sure not every table is all that, but there are plenty that are great fun. :) I've also been playing Aria of Sorrow on the Switch from the Castlevania Advance collection. Also quite fun.

Been playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, specifically the Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC. Soloing it with a Druid and her Smilodon animal companion. (The animal companion is *really* strong.) Currently level 13 (enough to cast Heal), but had a death that resulted in the Death's Door condition. (It seems that resting in town can remove it, but resting at rest spots that are unlocked by winning certain dungeon battles will not. Note that each rest is a single use in this mode, except that the town rest apparently renews each dungeon level. Also, while the condition's description says you need Greater Restoration to remove it with a spell, the spell you actually need is Raise Dead.)

Back to Rise of Nations: Extended Edition. Now playing Napoleon's Conquer the World campaign, spreading enlightenment philosophies to the nations of Europe. Playing two different paths concurrently. First, Northern France regions then go on to North African campaign. Second, go with the Northern Italian campaign then followed by conquest of Spain campaign.

currently engaged in a couple of games

-Fell Seal, after a disastrous start last year it seems i finally got me stuff together. Boy, some of those fights can take a while though.

- Humankind, a more serious try then previous, slower game, harder opponents. currently standing fourth, in the bronze age era

- Age of Wonders III, first campaign 2d mission, you know the one with the roguish elven princess

also try-outing the new HOTAS joystick i got meself for Christmass

so i have Elite dangerous and Ace Combat 7 installed, again

in Jedi Fallen Order i'm not so serious on a Nightsisters planet, -- spoiler, -- there still here!

With days lingering by in lockdown conciliation ( goverment wants you too stay home, i oppose but it is not that i have better things to do but i won't admit this fact. 3d party is/are random online sympathizers ) Its more or less moving from game to game as demanded by the plight of the moment.

>> did I just now forget to mention FF7? yes i did<< but with good reason!!!!

You can make battles shorter by changing the difficulty settings. Specifically, taking away enemy item use and enemy revive can go a long way to shorten battles.

(Then again, there's also some abilities that prevent resurrection if used to kill a target.)

OK, that is good to know, i did take a peak at the difficulty settings and noticed a lot of options.
If you don't mind a question or 2 btw....
Would you recommend its DLC? does it add or is it only for those really going for every achievement? I rarely play games like this multiple times.
and,
I wondered about the ai settings, is it worthwhile to use, even in the more difficult battles?

I really enjoyed playing with the DLC. Note that it's generally recommended to start a new game with it (and plan on using monster party members if you do so).

Basically, it adds the following to the game:
* Monster variants, which mean that now not all two monsters of the same species are the same. In other words, without the DLC only enemy humans have random abilities, but with the DLC, enemy monsters do as well.
* Missions: These are tasks that you can send party members on, which then take a certain amount of real time to complete. (Note that the timer continues to count down even when the game is closed.) This is great for getting extra AP to characters without having to use them, and even with only having to open the game occasionally. (Even if you just have a few minutes, not enough to play a battle, you could still send characters on a mission.) Also used to unlock new characters, and you can also get an early monster this way.
* Monsters can be recruited. This is probably the most interesting new feature. The monster variants I mentioned earlier are now available to player monsters, which leads to some new build possibilities. New abilities are available (like Heal Storm), and even some formerly enemy-only abilities (including one the final boss uses) can be acquired with the right variant.
* Hunts and Large Battles are added as optional battles. Hunts are small scale battles; typically you might have only 4 units out (sometimes with a forced story character), but there are just a few enemies (typically monsters). to deal with, so these battles tend to be short. Large Battles have lots of enemies, but you can deploy (IIRC) 9 units.
* As of a recent patch, there are two new monster types that will only appear with the DLC, and exist primarily to add new monsters to recruit, along with new abilities for that one bug (not a glitch).

That does sound nice, though i can't start with imagining how much time those larger battles will consume. Not that it really is a point of issue. I'll keep this recommendation in mind. Thanks for obliging ;)

I like to play multiplayer games with friends, as well as sometimes in story games. For example The Last of Us or Ancharted. But also I like and live games that I play not on the computer. I'm talking about quests. It's also pretty fun.

Sakuna

Starting again The Secret of Monkey Island.

I have a "good" story, i was young and bought me TSoMI, four floppy version VGA, and when i started to play, in the box there were 2 discs two and no disc three, and i could never play it for years until i bought a Monkey Madness version with the two first games. I didn´t think about going to the store to claim a good copy of the game. I only had to play with discs until the program said to insert the missing disc (and it wasn´t the floppy disk 22!).

Recently played...

Final Fantasy 7 Remake - The nostalgia here was strong, but outside of that it's a pretty flawed game IMO. The story structure was not changed enough to compensate for it being only the first 10% of the original game. It just feels padded rather than expanded. The combat is fun but nothing super special. Great presentation though.

Deathloop - Good fun but probably my least favorite Arkane game. It's far too repetitive with only four levels you do over and over, and it lacks the Dishonored and Prey immersion and story that makes those games stand above the norm. Also the game is way too easy after you get a few upgrades, which makes the repetition feel even more boring. I enjoyed it but finished it ASAP.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits - A very well made Zelda clone kind of game. Not enough good Zelda clones IMO. Some places bill it as a typical open world action game and I don't think that's true at all, it's very old school Zelda. Great presentation, with a nice story and lovely visuals and music. Nothing earth shattering but very enjoyable.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Earthblood - A handful of hours into this and the stealth is terrible. I am a huge stealth fan which is why I got it in a deep sale despite its reputation, but the stealth is too poorly designed to be fun. It's kind of fun to play it action style and rip through everything though, but I doubt I'll finish it.

Really enjoying my first playthrough of Astalon-Tears of the Earth. Metroidvania style game with an interesting level-up system and difficult-but-fair gameplay.

Noita.

I've beat it a few times, but I was at a stalemate in terms of progress, and I still hadn't been able to access the parallel words. But I made a giant leap. I finally was able to defeat the volcano lake boss and the High Alchemist, unlocking the worm/meteor rain spells and the Greek Letter spells respectively. In addition, I have unlocked the color spells from the lake. Now I have my eyes on a next set of objectives:

1) Collect all 11 orbs of the present world. (I've gotten 9 so far after hundreds of runs).
2)Unlock the conditional spells
3) Conquer the sky.
4) Complete the sun quests
5) Travel to parallel worlds.

Only after being able to get a reliable digging method (Tannerkivi + Paha Silmä) was I able to defeat the High Alchemist. Now it's only a matter of time (and learning from my many, many mistakes).