Sorry if I came off as dismissive, my first paragraph was just me musing on why this community in particular hasn’t taken off.

So here is my opinion on the series: Ninja Gaiden Black is an adventure game with great combat. You have exploration, platforming and even an almost Metroidvania-like hub area you backtrack back and forth through. It’s occasionally almost Zelda-like rather than purely an action game. Playing it on Xemu also offsets one of its flaws - stingy checkpoint placement. Just use (but don’t abuse) save states and don’t worry about it. It runs flawlessly on Xemu without any specific setup, and you can set rendering resolution to like x6 and it will look great.

Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360 version) feels like the crack cocaine of action games. Or I dunno, freebase Meth maybe. It feels like the best action game ever 50% of the time and the worst action game ever 50% of the time. It’s almost pure action, just one murder hallway after another. The sheer amount of enemies, the aggression of the AI and the speed of the combat gives you adrenaline rushes like nothing else. HOWEVER! The game was rushed to release as the devs chased a bonus payout, and the game is blatantly not playtested and balanced properly. It’s especially apparent in the second half of the game. I developed a sort of love-hate relationship with it: I screamed at it in frustration more often than most games but I also cannot wait to go back.

Setting it up in Xenia Canary was much more fiddly than using Xemu. The game must be hard capped at 60 FPS. You need to tweak a bunch of config settings to minimise the occurrence of an audio bug where sound might cut out until you restart (I can send you my config if you want). If you want to increase rendering resolution by x3 you need to accept some minor graphical glitches (primarily in the first couple of chapters).

Don’t play NG3RE unless you’ve already played the other two and can’t wait for NG4. Otherwise just pick your flavour - more adventure game and better balance or an unbalanced but beautiful mess? I should also note that both games are fairly short, my NGB playthrough was 14h and NG2 was 13h, so it’s not a big commitment to play one after the other.

I think I’ll do BG3 after I tire of Nightreign. I started it but it didn’t click the first time for whatever reason. I loved Divinity 2 so I’m sure BG3 will click for me at some point.

How’s the Skyrim modding scene these days? Only news I see is about Bethesda’s meddling in it.

I consider myself a Souls veteran and more toward the ‘gud’ side of the scale but Shadow of the Erdtree was a real kick in the teeth. I mean I loved it but Fromsoft didn’t hold back on the difficulty. Even with all of the new collectable powerups it’s burly as hell.

On the driving topic - maybe you can help me. I’ve got a bunch of racing games but am having trouble picking one. It’d be nice to have one that’s easy enough to get into but realistic enough that it takes a while to master.

100% agree with your assessment of Witcher 3. It’s gorgeous and well written but yeah the gameplay is so muddy and janky. I did make it through finally too and loved the Blood and Wine expansion dearly in spite of all that.

I’m going to bring Super Video Golf to my crew, that sounds like a nice distraction when we don’t have the energy for another run in Nightreign.

Putting the blackgaol knight where he is is a frankly hilarious statement of how the DLC is gonna be. I’m good enough at the games to beat everything without cheese or summons (I do think that summoning is fine, I just don’t personally enjoy it unless it’s an NPC I like), but I find that some Elden Ring bosses push the edge of what I have the reaction speed for. Morgott and Maliketh were particularly troublesome for me. I haven’t gotten to anyone in the DLC that has hit that mark of pace yet, but I assume someone will

I’m not super knowledgeable on racing games, but I’m happy to try to help! What have you got available and what do you like?

Huh that actually sounds amazing - you had me at sandbox WW2. Is it worth getting a bundle or is the base game enough to get started?

Yeah another shallow ocean. I like open world games and games that give you lots of freedom. The mechanics of that are all in the game. Gunplay is fun, vehicle driving is meh. Selection of vehicles is kind of meh. Plot is meh. The missions are 50% fetch quests 50% go here and break into 1/3 different environments with enemies and kill everyone there.

I won’t buy another Ubisoft game after this. I got this game 85% off and it feels like I overpaid.

I’m trying to 100% tropico 6 before the new one comes out.

Also been playing various games in luanti, minecloneia specifically

Huh glad I posted here, never heard of Infra before. Sounds like something I’ve been after for a while. I don’t have a problem with violence in video games but I do wish there were more great games that weren’t based around it.

The concept of Infra sounds really chill. My seldom-gaming partner might even be interested in joining me on the journey.

Valheim, I’ve been playing solo most of the time, recently joined a new server.

Insurgency: Sandstorm, for a quick shooter fix. The player base is getting smaller these days. It’s getting hard to get into a domination game.

The base game is fine if you just want to see how it plays. But if you’re big into WW2 and you actually end up liking the game, the bundles are well worth it.

The base game has several campaigns including Normandy 1944, Pacific, Italy and Tunisia. If you buy the bundles you get Stalingrad, France 1940 and the Bulge, and the Shanghai-Nanking campaigns of the Second Sino-Japanese war.

You also get a bunch of new weapons, vehicles, and additional props for map making and creating missions.

Roguelites are gradually becoming my favorite genre - going to have to check Magicraft out. Sounds like it has some of the same elements that I loved in Noita?

It’s a high paced fps in general. The original mode is semi roguelite, meaning, you have to go every 10 floors in order to get a checkpoint. If you don’t, back to the previous checkpoint and get different perks for the run.

For me the whole cyberpunk esque thing about it sold me. And is also a quite unusual sort of shooter.

Only a tad short, that is my biggest complaint (but price does match the time so I can’t say much)

Yeah I’ve tried it and bounced off it a couple of times, but I get the sense that it’s one of those games where eventually I’ll push past the beginning part and then become obsessed with it for a while lol. Alien: Isolation was one of those too.

I’m very deep into a full Rimworld playthrough with the new DLC. Being able to build a grav ship and hop around the world has opened it up so much that I’ll probably be on this for a while yet.

Obligatory weird Rimworld storytime: I’m currently super invested in this one character who was a dirt mole kid that some colony guests just left behind. We took her in because why not, and she turned out to be a pretty good melee scrapper with a penchant for losing body parts. No worries, we have bionics, we can rebuild her. So a bionic eye, an arm and a couple of new legs later, she gets her nose shot off by a turret. At the same moment some vampires arrive and want to have a meeting in our spaceship, and offer to make someone a vampire in return. So now I’m pretty sure immortal noseless cyborg vampire girl is going to end up leading the whole colony but I really want to see where this goes. The current leader is the last OG colonist still alive, but she’s currently ruling from hospital because a lancer blew the spine right out of her body so her effectiveness is limited until I can source a new spine.

I’m working on getting all the ending dialogues for Metal Slug Tactics right now. It’s a fun turn-based tactics take on the Metal Slug franchise with a dash of roguelike. The graphics maintain the series’ hand-animated aesthetic and the sprites are super-cute, but the most rewarding part is unlocking skills and weapons for each character to allow bigger and more ridiculous combo moves. Other than that, Stormworks, my “second job”.

I was playing FF7 rebirth …got about 60 hours in and Im having trouble beating the game. Its just so boring with the sidequests. And the map is insanely big with nothing but a couple of monsters. They definitely padded out the game. Its not a bad game and it has its moments.

So I started to play Detlarune after my wife got it for me for my Bday. Got through the 1st chapter and im really enjoying it. Im just going to play that now and maybe come back to ff7…if I feel like it.

Skyrim, next to my wife who is experiencing it for the first time. And OSRS because always

everything in the modding scene seems to be in order

Huh, probably Black is the one then, I’m a pretty big fan of that style you describe and have actually been hankering for one lately.

Ninja Gaiden 2 sounds like someething everyone needs to experience once too though so maybe I’ll put both on my list. I’m not super excited to fiddle with emulators but it sounds like it’d be worth it.