TheMightyEthan

I want to try Cuphead, but I've been scared away by the difficulty. It would be the perfect Game Pass game.

So is he like building himself a ladder of technology from stone age, only using what he's done before? Or is he skipping around?

Hardspace: Shipbreaker This game is great. You play as a scrap worker in an orbital drydock, breaking down ships that have reached end of life. You have to crawl inside them and cut struts to break it into manageable pieces, pull out valuable electronics before sending the bulk frame into the smelter, avoid accidentally cutting fuel lines, or piercing a still-pressurized compartment, that kind of thing. All for an evil corporation that has put you in about a billion dollars of debt just to get your training and whatnot, and now you have to work it off. It's so satisfying and cool. It's also Homeworld: Shipbreaker in all but name, all the ships are very much in the style of those games. It just adds another awesome layer on top of the already superb experience.

Neon White No shade on this game, it is exactly what it wants to be. Problem is it's not what I want it to be, but that's not the game's fault. It's just a little too repetitive for my tastes, and I'm not a fan of how there's a "correct" solution to each level. It's very well made though, and if you're someone who enjoys learning a set pattern and executing on it perfectly, then this is the game for you. And I don't want to make it sound like I hate it, I enjoyed the first several worlds, it's just not the kind of thing I want to do indefinitely. It's also stylish as all get out, like the best looking Game Cube game ever made. I definitely think it deserves all the praise it gets. Grade: A

Spoilers because I think not knowing the answer to that question is beneficial to the experience.

I buy things from CDkeys on occasion, and for at least the last several years they've always been a regular digital code, no scanned cards anymore.

Maybe in their focus testing it just appealed to US audiences more. Just anecdotal, but the extra "and a Half" makes it sound more intriguing to me.

I may be confusing them with another site, but I was thinking they were the one that let anyone put keys up for sale, so they end up with lots of stolen keys on there even though they themselves don't steal keys. CDkeys is grey market in the sense that they aren't an official distributor, and they exploit pricing differentials between different countries, but all their keys are legitimately purchased. *Edit - Further research reveals Gamers Gate is not the site I was thinking of, I'm still looking to try to figure out what that was. *Edit 2 - G2A is the one I was thinking of. Sorry for the confusion.

You avoid CD keys but use Gamersgate? Good game though, I liked it, and the reflections on the rainy streets are gorgeous.

Deliver Us the Moon In this game you play as an astronaut investigating a lunar colony that's lost contact with Earth. Most of the game revolves around environmental puzzle solving in the sense of figuring out how to get the right stuff turned on, or opened, or whatever, so you can get where you need to go, and the story of what happened is revealed in bits and pieces along the way. It's all very hard sci-fi, NASA-punk aesthetic. It's basically like this game was designed for me. Grade: A+

This is the only one on your list that I've read, but I also really liked it a lot. Recommendation seconded. Interesting side note: My copy was titled "The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" (emphasis mine), but I've seen both titles. Not sure which is the original.

So, I'm having to return my 3060 Ti because the HDMI port cuts out intermittently. At first it would only happen after coming back from sleep and I could fix it by just unplugging and replugging it, but it's been getting worse and now it happens even if I do that. It wasn't available for replacement, just return and refund, and I took that as a sign that I chose wrong the first time, and used the opportunity to upgrade.

Deliver Us the Moon Started this last night. I've only done the first two missions, but so far I'm really liking it. At the end of the first mission there's a rocket launch, and you actually are flipping all the switches and shit in the cockpit, and it is one of the coolest things I've ever done in a game. I would buy a VR game that was just that (though it would need to be more detailed). It's also the first game I'm actually playing (ie not just benchmarking) that supports RT and DLSS, and it's so pretty. (And with DLSS even my puny 3060 Ti can run it at 4k 50-60 fps with full RT.) If the rest of the game stands up to first impressions it may be one of my favorite games I play this year, and I'm already looking forward to Deliver Us Mars.

I had this on PS4, and the free upgrade to PS5 just came out, which was advertised as supporting 60 fps and ray tracing, so I was excited to finally play it. Well, I have discovered it does support those things, just not at the same time, and the ray tracing is only shadows, not reflections. I must have reflections! So I bought the PC version for $6.

I didn't get past those bosses until I turned it on either.

Prey: Mooncrash Holy shit, that was great. If you've played Prey, it's more of that, except in a roguelite wrapper, and it just works so so well. The story conceit is that you're investigating what happened on a Transtar moon base shortly before the events of the main game. It's really well put-together considering it's an entirely different structure from the main game, and it fleshes out the story in cool ways. If it had been broken out into a standalone thing like Death of the Outsider then I might have been disappointed with the amount of content (just over 8 hours to completely finish it), but as an add-on it's fantastic. Grade: A+

I thought I was using it from the beginning, but it actually wasn't on for the first 8 runs, and then when I did turn it on found out it's not retroactive so I didn't get "credit" for those first 8 runs towards my resistance, which was another thing that irritated me about the game. I was this close to quitting when that happened.

By modifiers do you mean the "punishments" you get access to after escaping the first time? If so I only did one run after having access to those. As far as the other stuff, I mostly stuck with the spear cause it was the only weapon I could reliably make it far with (I liked its reach), but I varied the boons as I came across them.

Look what building a new PC has done to me!

That looks so amazing...

*looks at the 4k TV my computer is connected to...* Nah, but my tolerance for low framerates is higher than a lot of people, and I play with a controller, so as long as I can keep them north of about 40 I'm happy. Also upscaling has gotten good enough that outputting a lower res is less of a problem than it used to be too.

Good sound is more important than it gets credit for from most people.

That's true, I keep focusing on the "3060" part and not the "Ti" part, but based on benchmarks my card is basically on par with a 3070, so it's not low-end (for the generation) like I keep thinking it is.

Between Dan proselytizing and all the praise I've been hearing on podcasts I decided to bite. lol, okay, maybe not when they come out. For some reason I had late 2023 in my head...

Aww, now I have graphics card envy. I'll probably get a 40-something when they come out...