In the past few months I’ve been playing a lot of Knockout City. It’s dodge-ball but on steroids.
It’s honestly the most fun I’ve had with a competitive multi-player in years. Sadly the player base has also been dwindling over the past few months, so the future of the game is uncertain.
It’s free to play until “Street Rank 25” (which is the in-game level for unlocking cosmetics and basically a few hours of gameplay), I also wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes completely free2play sooner rather than later (due to the dwindling player base).
If this catches your interest, let me know, and I’d be happy to show you the ropes.
I barely played games for like ~2.5 years but lately (after I started feeling better due to physiotherapy and some diet changes) I started coming back to them after this huge hiatus.
I get more and more invested into various Nintendo Switch games. Being able to just get the controller and play for some amount of time without any investment of additional time or money (unlike 99% of the mobile games and a good chunk of the newer PC games) is a huge advantage.
Plus I play shoot-'em-ups and beat-'em-ups, old school arcade style. I find that to be the most relaxing to me but I have to admit that I started enjoying mini-DarkSouls-like RPGs (where you have to learn and apply patterns) and they started appealing to me as well.
I loved the story… but watched it on YouTube! The graphics didn’t appeal to me, I’m a bit spoiled like that but really, I loved watching the playthrough, it was like a very good movie with strange CGI. Will likely watch it again soon.
I’m still “stuck” on Knockout City for my go-to “comfort gaming”. Before that my comfort game was actually Hades.
Apart of that I’m currently dabbling with Dyson Sphere Program - which I’m enjoying even more than I thought I would - and occasionally Project Zomboid with friends.
Still Factorio here, been playing on a server I host with others. Recently got a somewhat slow but consistent source of each raw resource to be found in the original solar system, just about to expand to our first deep space asteroid belt, need to build up a mining operation there. Don’t have any up-to-date pictures, but hmm, let me see if I can find some older I sent to others…
Click the paragraphs to expand and show the images.
Here was a moon where we set up Holminite mining operations, it was such a tiny tiny tiny little moon, low surface gravity makes launching very cheap, we mapped the whole thing out with ease it was so tiny:
Here was my first reusable starship, no longer have to waste on cargo rockets for intra-system movement (getting back with rockets is such a pain, starship is so easy in comparison!). This ship has long since been upgraded with vastly improved technology over the past few weeks, I even have a whole shipyard with 3 fully automated starships hauling resources around the system now!
Well this was the ending of a story... So this was like 3 weeks ago now but we were getting a CME (basically a solar flare about to hit this planet, it... wouldn't be good for the factory, lots of fire and heat and destruction, which would be especially bad if it hit the nuclear reators), lots of warning, about 2 days of in-game time ahead of time so we set up for it, expanded out Fission energy production to 16 reactors generating like 2.4GW of power or something like that, along with a newly developed Fusion power plant with 2 energy producing reactors making almost 3GW of excess power after heating and production losses. (apparently detail tags in discourse don't support multiple lines, sorry about lack of paragraphs...) The base itself was eating about 2GW, the defenses against the native bug life forms were.... immense, and had an idle power draw of near a GW all on its own, and when it started being under full load it could easily pull 3-4GW on its own, thankfully the bugs never caused it all to crank to up, just bits and pieces here and there. Well the CME was about to hit so we hunkered down in the base ready to ride it out and deal with whatever comes up if we didn't make quite enough power for the extremely magnetic and power intensive magnetic particle shield that pulled almost 2GW at max load, and the CME started and would last a few minutes. Well no later then 10s or so after it started the bugs caused a pretty big attack wave, just random chance, probably should have cleared out more nests before we started, so the defenses ramped up to fight them off, and ramped up, and ramped up, and oh no the base was now trying to use more power than we were producing, aaand since we didn't want firey death from the solar flare we decided to hit the switch to disconnect the entire fission reactors from the rest of the base, dumping its entire power into its own sustainment and the magnetic particle field, hoping the fusion would keep going long enough for us to reconnect it. Well, the fusion couldn't keep up, trying to power the entire factory and defenses that were trying to pull ~4GW of power when it barely could put out 3GW meant that the plasma preheaters were now getting short on power and only operating intermittently, no longer able to keep the plasma hot enough to feed into the fusion injectors, so a feedback loop happened where the fusion made less power, making the preheaters heat even less, which then made even less power, until it all shut down, the entire process took less than 10s. Well, without power from the fusion the very few solar fields we had (screw solar when we have all the nuclear fuel we could ever want right?) couldn't power even the defenses idle draw, so basically everything was offline because no power. Aaaand since the bugs were doing one of their attack waves then started eating the defenses, which made them happy so they called out to more bugs as they were actually making progress for once, which made more attacks from more areas, and they ate through the defenses and started going into the big open area between the defenses and the base, they hit the outer resource mining fields and ate through those, us just in the main factory looking horrified at the devastation to the base and the impending doom to the factory, we were really thinking of taking the magnetic particle field offline and just dealing with whatever remained of the CME so we could bring what few defenses remained back online, but we decided to wait until they got a bit closer... The bugs even started setting up new nests in our open field inside the (now dead) main defensive line! Well the CME was winding down, only requiring about 500MW of power to keep the solar flare at bay so we decided to hook the fission reactor back up to the main base. The fusion preheaters ate most of its power and the rest dribbled in to the remaining defenses that the bugs hadn't eaten yet and managed to start pushing back the bugs. Nothing could really run well yet though because of too low power but the preheaters were getting back up to speed and finally after about 30 seconds the Fusion injectors kicked back up to full operation, the factory glowing back to life within a few seconds as the heat from the fusion reactors trickled back to the boilers then steam to turbines to spin up power again and the remaining defenses finally kicked back into full gear, protecting themselves and their surrounding areas long enough for the repair systems to start rebuilding what was lost now that they had power again. So slowly the base's repair systems (a combination of a swarm of thousands of drones as well as repairing towers that bounce replacement things along them to their destinations along yellow-green beams) started rebuilding the defensive line, pushing back the bugs until we were fully enclosed again and still alive! This image is the repair beams rebuilding one of the mining fields on a patch of ore (looks like iron ore) as the main base produced new replacement miners for it to place back down.
Here's a yet even older image from a month ago, our first Space Station platform with some very spaghetti'sh production to start producing rocket oriented science.
To be honest, the list of games that I play is quite large. Most of all I like to play Minecraft and Factorio. I also like watching football and betting.
Wow, I guess it’s been a while since I last played.
I like how many older games are being ported to the platform. All my favorites from the PlayStation 2 era are available, as are most of PS3 (exclusives aside). Having these games in portable format is such a luxury!
The Space Exploration mod, lol. The mod author was hired by Wube last year and development on it mostly stopped (just bug fixes), at the same time Factorio announced an addon to Factorio is being made, soooo maybe?
We’ve since taken a deep space asteroid field for those super rare resources, have a few things in other solar systems, building gravitational stability whatever things on a few suns for <reasons>, got all the science now, we could easily win by the normal victory condition, but we are working toward the secret win condition, which is a bit more work. ^.^
For a picture, here’s my nexus ship to acquire deep space data, it needed to be as utterly as fast as possible (it’s been upgraded a little since its first build since more research since, so here’s its current look while careening through space at over 325 units of speed, which is… incredibly fast in this, though it’s heavy and the asteroids are dense so lots of defenses (lasers and shields)), this image is vastly shrunk from its original 17 meg high quality image, but should give the idea of it, I just needed speed, raw unfiltered speed, every bit of possible integrity donated to speed and defenses and power to power it all, it generates intersteller data quite quickly:
Last couple of weeks the only game for me has been Elden Ring. It’s the RPG I’ve always dreamt of, with exploration center of the experience and full focus on immersion.
The graphics didn’t appeal to me, I’m a bit spoiled like that 
but really, I loved watching the playthrough, it was like a very good movie with strange CGI. Will likely watch it again soon.
but it’s currently on sale and I am likely to buy it.
