Coelacanth

I’m definitely curious how that plays out. The version of Gwent in Witcher 3 is very fun but… I don’t know if I’d call balanced.

If it’s basic to love orchids I don’t want to be extra.

At least the remakes won’t have to suffer from the same affliction as Kingdom Hearts, whereby everyone believes creator Testuya Nomura is making it up as he goes along

Yes, I’m glad the FF7R games are far removed from the Nomura/Najima dream team and there is no need to worry about that problem.

I can’t really go by playtime, because I tend to beat a game and move on to a new experience. But Withering Rooms was like 2023, that’s another one I am completely obsessed with. Death Howl from last year was also amazing. Darkwood is I guess 2010s but I am (trying) to play it right now, also phenomenal. With some notable exceptions I feel like my most memorable gaming experiences are indie games nowadays.

Titanium Court is the best game I’ve played all year and it’s currently only €9.99. Indie games keep completely dominating the value proposition in gaming.

That’s totally fair. Even though I like using companions I don’t always use them, the lonely desolate vibe is definitely part of the charm of STALKER.

I totally respect a dogmatic anti-AI stance. I hate gen AI for most things, in particular art - where I want absolutely zero AI. I personally think dynamic dialogue in a sandbox game is one of the best use cases for it, but I still do hate the intellectual property theft and environmental impact.

That’s fair enough. I personally love playing with companions, especially since the TALKER mod with AI dialogue lets you have some really fun emergent narratives and role playing.

Which is the Alife collection? I think what most people are playing with now is Alife+, although that got released a few months after I stopped playing the last time so I have no first hand accounts of it. I do have a couple of good AI mods in that sheet I linked, like Semi-Radiant AI and rank-based travel.

Otherwise like ReDone Combat AI, RE:Vision, Stealth are popular mods. Probably also want Decreased Enemy Bush Hearing Distance, Zone NPCs Can’t See Through Bushes and Zone Mutants Can’t See Through Bushes and Ghillie Rework. Some of these mods probably need some minor compatibility work for script merging or at least load order management.

Useful Idiots that I already recommended is in my opinion essential for companions (and includes the functionality of the He Is With Me mod you already have installed, I would just replace that with it). Companions Disable Headlamps In Stealth is also good, I’m trying to remember if there is a newer version somewhere though. There might be.

These were just some off the top of my head, I’m probably forgetting something.

This looks amazing, actually. While I usually don’t allow myself the luxury of replaying games this long, a mod like this (combined with the upcoming DLC) might make me reconsider.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. It’s a fine balance between immersion (which to me is one of the main draws of STALKER) and enjoyable gameplay. I tried playing a Call of Chernobyl-based modpack called A.R.E.A. as a counter example, and that shit is just pure pain. Way too much “realism”, way too little fun. It was certainly interesting but… yeah.

Though actually on the note of spotting you from half the map, there are a ton of helpful AI mods that are pretty much standard that I should probably also dig up for you…

I might have to play around with those a bit more. I don’t mind though, it’s suppose to be fun not feel like a punishment.

Well, that’s the thing - STALKER players are generally masochists who hate themselves and love misery! The punishment is the fun! How else would mods like Fatal Error be so popular?

I’m only halfway in that camp, though, even though I do enjoy the loot/survival/scavenging based gameplay. I don’t play the G.A.M.M.A. modpack myself, but I do use a similar design philosophy to that in my own custom list where traders don’t sell guns or armour, everything drops in low condition and you need to scavenge stuff for parts to progress (I forgot to mention Weapon Parts Overhaul probably).

I have been slowly playing Darkwood, still. We’ll see if I finish it or not, but if I do this will be the world’s slowest playthrough probably. I think the game is very good, but it does stress me out quite a lot. I have a hard time playing it for extended periods of time between the tension, the occasional confusion of what to do and the general difficulty. A lot of the time I will play through a single day/night cycle, save during the time freeze the next morning after having survived the night and exit and do something else.

Regardless of whether I finish it myself or watch a playthrough of someone else though I am glad to have played it. I really love the atmosphere, the writing and characters. I love the gameplay design that manages to make a top-down survival game without jumpscares both generally unsettling and even genuinely fucking scary at times. And as I’ve said last week, the sound design is just some of the best I’ve heard, and such a huge part of what makes everything land.

This has the potential to be incredible. I trust Nightdive.

That’s awesome, do you know if it has the DLCs included? Survival (part of the Mission Mode DLC) is my favourite part of the game for quick access mindless action.

In general NG2 is an incredibly unique game. To this day there is nothing quite like it, you will either love it or hate it - and probably both in equal measures. It was unfortunately rushed out and released in an unfinished and unbalanced state due to some internal issues at Team Ninja, and you see this particularly in the later levels and the higher difficulties. But when it hits and it’s delivering fights against groups of humanoid enemies it really delivers a feeling of “what if cocaine was playable?” that no other game matches.

Will be interested to hear your thoughts, and let me know if you want any tips. It doesn’t really play like any other action games.

Are you planning on giving Ninja Gaiden 2 a spin? You have a chance to experience the original Chapter 10 staircase fight, where there are so many enemies on screen at once the game slows down to full-on bullet time time dilation because there is too much game for the hardware to handle.

Yes well, development on official Anomaly versions is extremely slow, and so Demonized releases his modded exes on a much faster development cycle.

Yeah, the modding landscape is very messy. A lot of presumed foreknowledge, very user unfriendly and also very scattered. Nexusmods for Anomaly is largely unused, ModDB is a mess and a lot of stuff is now scattered across various Discords, sometimes with important patches and additions buried deep inside threads with absolutely zero discoverability.

I would personally recommend some weather mod, I find vanilla weathers pretty underwhelming in comparison. There are a bunch though, Melancholy Weathers is close to a 1.0 release. But I have that opinion about most things Vanilla Anomaly. It does its intended job extremely well, which is to be a stable and unified platform for modders (compared to the mess of Call of Chernobyl-based mods that preceeded it), but it’s fairly lacking without add-ons. Although I may just have been ruined at this point, I have played and modded Anomaly a lot.

Another thing I forgot was the Mod Configuration Menu. A lot of mods will also depend on that for configuration. It’s so easy to forget all these absolute bedrock foundational mods, sorry! Here is another must-have: Beef’s NVGs.

Final recommendation (for now) is Dark Signal Audio packs. These are some of the best sounds you can find for Anomaly. They work fine with the other audio mods from that sheet I linked, you can futz with the load order in MO2 to decide which should overwrite what.

Let me know if there is something else specific you’re looking for, I can go back and sift through my stuff and refresh my memory. But I think the absolute best way to get a baseline grasp of what exists out there is to download some modpack(s) and look through their mod list. Even if you decide to build from scratch yourself later rather than use something as a baseline, it will help clue you in into what mods exist.

Enjoy! The intended experience is playing on Hard (semi-permadeath, you have limited extra lives) but I recommend playing on Normal. I started off on Hard but restarted on Normal because I still have a faint hope of actually finishing the game and I think it’s a little too difficult to pull that off on a first playthrough on Hard (and I’m not going to start over if I lose my save after 15 hours).

But keep that in mind when playing. The tension and stakes are just so much higher when you have limited extra lives. It definitely does heighten the experience.

The fascist quest is actually quite interesting. I was definitely surprised by it, although I shouldn’t have been given the general level of writing in Disco. It’s a shame so few players will actually get to see it.

But yeah, being mean to Kim sucks though.

It’s worth sitting through as “homework” for the later games, in my opinion. It has some great moments still, and the story is interesting. But yeah, a bit too much clunky combat in similar-looking forests.

I almost forgot! You may already be using them, but you’re going to need a version of the modded exes as many mods depend on them. They are already baked into the PiP engine mod if you go digging on the GAMMA Discord, but if you don’t then grab them here. Use the MT-Test version if you don’t use the PiP exes, it has more performance. (I can’t live without PiP anymore though).

Also visually Screen Space Shaders, Atmospherics and Weather Expansion are used by many. I also really like Arrival.

But there is a ton of stuff you can add, an entire Toxic Air/Gas Mask system like in Metro is available if you want and so much more. If you like having companions around the TALKER mod lets you hook up AI to get dynamic dialogue.

Making your own custom modlist is definitely the most satisfying thing, although I recommend using some kind of vanilla+ mod pack as a baseline just to save time. Last year when I was playing and modding STALKER Anomaly I used the now-defunct HACR, but it lives on spiritually as Null Point. That should be a good moddable baseline. Back then when I was hanging out in the HACR Discord I put together this document of some mods I liked that I added on top of the pack. I haven’t played or updated that document since last winter though and there’s been some new cool stuff.

Otherwise there are tons of YouTube videos out there that list like, Top 10 X-type mods for STALKER Anomaly, those are a good way to find new stuff. ModDB is full of nice mods, although unfortunately a lot is moving to Discord now. Hang out in the STALKER G.A.M.M.A. Discord server, that’s (unfortunately) a place where a lot of new cool shit gets posted. There is an engine mod on there that gives true Picture-In-Picture scopes with negligible performance hit, if you care about that stuff.

Also, make sure you know your way around some kind of text-comparison program like WinMerge or your favourite code editor because you’re going to have to merge some scripts and make your own patches if you’re building your own custom modlist.

I really want to get to FF XII some day. I never got around to it, but the Gambit system intrigues me so much. I loved the tactics system in DA: Origins, I even installed mods to make it even more advanced and had a lot of fun setting up programming for characters to be sort of self playing pianos.

Also I like the Ivalice setting.

I haven’t actually been playing any games for the past week, so I don’t have all that much to talk about. Today was the first time I actually sat down and played anything, which was some random Ninja Gaiden 2 survival mode on Xenia Edge emulator and then a couple of fights on my ongoing playthrough of modded Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. The latest custom moveset mod from ShowR18 dropped the other day and so I played around a bit with the new toys.

Otherwise I want to get back to my first playthrough of Darkwood, which I only just started last week. Game is incredible, absolutely top notch horror and atmosphere - without a single deliberate jump scare. Some of the best sound design you’ll ever hear, and some just brutal, oppressive survival horror. I am not easily spooked, but this game gets to me. Almost to the point where I am not sure I will finish it, actually. The convergence of gameplay design and audiovisual design during the nights in your hideout make for some of the most tense moments I’ve ever experienced in gaming. It’s similar-ish to the powerlessness you feel towards the xenomorph in Alien Isolation, but this might honestly be scarier.

Oh man, are you playing vanilla Anomaly? It’s a solid place to start and all, but the rabbit hole goes deep when it comes to modding. STALKER has a huge modding scene, especially in Eastern Europe, and there are tons of plug-and-play modpacks out there. If you’re into the game and want a more elaborate, more refined experience there is a metric ton of content out there, whether you want more survival/scavenging stuff, a vanilla+ experience with just better graphics or a classic unhinged STALKER Soup.

Wasn’t there a CoD or Battlefield game or something that was several hundreds of GBs some year or two ago? I want to say ~100 GB is about what you can expect for a AAA title these days, unfortunately.

Her Story has been on my radar for a while. It looks very interesting and there are so few genuine detective games out there, so I’ve had this pop up in my recommendations before. I might float it to my sister and her fiancé, the three of us are playing puzzle games together some weekends. Right now we’re working through Séance of Blake Manor and honestly it’s been kind of disappointing. So getting into an actual puzzle/deduction game again would be a nice change.

Backlog Cleanup Duty continues. This week I finally finished Ninja Gaiden 4 on Hard. That last boss was a real struggle for me, I actually didn’t think I was going to make it for a long time. I think maybe I should have replayed the whole last level as I didn’t realise it was a boss rush in the end and I used up too many items on the first of the three final bosses (luckily the middle boss was a cakewalk). I still have to play the DLC but I may come back for that later.

Honestly, I have a lot of thoughts about this game. The best way I can sum it up is: NG4 has absolutely great combat, but it should have been a spin-off called Ninja Gaiden: Blood Raven instead of Ninja Gaiden 4. They should have completely removed Ryu from this game and let Platinum Games do their own thing with Yakumo without it needing to impede on the mainline franchise.

Now, as you may have noticed, I have not yet said that NG4 is a great game. Because when it comes to non-combat elements I have quite a lot of issues with it. The level design is bland - it’s basically just a bunch of corridors, sometimes with a side path. The art direction is also way less interesting than previous games. This is just your regular Japanese cyberpunk setting. It is better than NG3, but nowhere near NG1&2. This is also one of the worst cases of Yellow Paint-itis I’ve ever seen (literally all levels are just hallways, why the fuck is this much yellow paint slathered everywhere?). There are way too many visual effects - I was forced to install a shader level mod to remove a bunch because I literally couldn’t see what the fuck was happening in the combat disco. The story is bad - but not really fun bad, just boring. The love interest angle is weak and unnecessary. English voice acting is pretty flat. The new protagonist Yakumo is not compelling at all, he’s just a grumpy emo kid. There is a bunch of annoying “parkour” and rail grinding and surfing and shit which is effectively just QTEs with some makeup - we don’t want that in our Ninja Gaidens we want to kill a bunch of mooks. There are a bunch of small QOL problems that piss me off because they would be so easy to fix but nobody bothered. The save “system” is a prime example: not only is it autosave only, but the save points are idiotic. It will often autosave just before you reach a shop, so each time you die or reload you have to re-buy everything and turn in/accept new missions all over again. If you’re doing Purgatory Trials and die the reload point is before entering the arena. So every time you die you have to walk up, again re-buy whatever you want in the shop and then once again sit through the title card slowdown of starting a trial. And you will die a lot in purgatory trials. I could go on.

…buuut at the same time, the moment-to-moment combat of this game is absolutely great! It’s fast, perhaps faster than any Ninja Gaiden before it. It’s brutal. It has more freedom of creative expression with fluid combos than any previous Ninja Gaiden. Does it feel like a mainline Ninja Gaiden title? No. It feels like a spin-off. It feels like exactly what it is: a Platinum Games take on Ninja Gaiden. But that is still most likely the very best action combat of any game released in the past couple of years. And if you’re a CAG fan, if you’re an action gamer, does anything else matter?

Yeah, definitely something that could be much smoother respeccing into for NG+ rather than starting out as. I also imagine having to top up up ammo all the time might get a little annoying.

You get some NG+ toys that are bound to be fun and powerful for ranged characters, though.

I did the Luck build and it was super busted. Also nice to get tons of items and resources from all the Luck. Next run I’m planning on trying the ranged build, I feel like it could be powerful (although takes a while to come online). I also want to try a full caster build, especially in NG+ with the extra spells. Harvest Field was still crazy strong even with like 0 spell power investment.

Okay, my curiosity is piqued. Indie games with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews that you can buy for a couple of dollars is like catnip to me. Probably won’t play it any time soon but might snap it up on a future sale. I do like action games.