World’s biggest Monster Hunter fan
absolutely! Genshin is actually a surprisingly good game as a f2p player! If you’re having a lot of fun with it, I’d highly recommend checking Honkai: Star Rail! It’s somehow even more f2p friendly, and it’s clear they learned a LOT from Genshin when making it. It is a linear turn-based RPG though, so quite a different game from Genshin.
In Monster Hunter World’s iceborne expansion there’s a monster called Brachydios. It’s a giant blue monster that attacks by spreading explosive slime all over the arena and punching it to blow it up. In the postgame you can eventually fight a variant known as Raging Brachydios which is about twice as big and three times as agressive. For the most part it’s almost the same as the normal Brachy fight, just significantly more intense. That is, until near the end of the fight.
It should be noted that Monster Hunter games are hard. The base game is difficult. The expansions are even harder. The expansion post games? Brutal. Raging Brachydios is one of the most difficult fights I’ve ever had in a video game, only topped by the monsters that follow it in the same game. (soloing Fatalis is probably my greatest video game achievement of all time.)
So you’ve been stuck with this beast for about 20 minutes now, slowly wearing it down. You’re probably on your last life and you’ve burned through enough healing items to last you the entire base game. Finally this thing runs away, and you can tell you’re nearing the end. You sharpen your weapon one last time and follow the monster into that volcanic cavern.
Suddenly, it lets out a bellowing roar and starts rapidly punching the ground! Slime is flying everywhere and the entire room seems to heat up. You notice a message on the side of your screen: “Oh no! The entrance has been blocked off! Looks like you can’t use certain items!”. the Brachydios has sealed off your exits and disabled your traps and fast travel items. There is no running away. There is no capturing this thing. Neither of you are leaving this room until one of you is dead. You can tell Brachydios is getting desperate. It’s flailing wildly, throwing slime everywhere with none of the precision and technique it had before. It has recognized you as a serious threat and it does not want to die.
Eventually however, you triumph! The beast belts out one final roar and falls over dead. Exhausted, you take a moment to recover from that grueling fight and from its corpse you tear your well earned prize! Two ebonshell and a warhead. Looks like you’re gonna have to murder another couple dozen of these things for that immortal reactor. Happy hunting!
AI War 1 & 2 are both great and unique space RTS games. These games place you in the role of the last vestiges of humanity attempting to fight back against a galaxy spanning AI empire. You’re tasked with covertly taking down the rogue AI without letting them realize you’re a real threat, lest they bring the full might of their fleets down upon you.
Creeper World is a series of tower defense games with a unique twist: the enemy is a liquid! You’ll have to use a variety of weapons and tools to fight back against the literal tide of creeper. The third game is my personal favourite, though they’re all awesome.
Mosa Lina is self described as “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim”. This game is chaos incarnate. Every level you are given a random set of tools and must touch or destroy all fruit and make it to the goal. Some levels will not be possible. Failure is expected. You can do some prettt cool things with a spear and a phaser though.
new rimworld DLC came out and that has taken up all my time. I’ve got to admit I had a few doubts about this one compared to the others, but sure enough they did it again and made an absolute banger of an expansion and now I have to sink another couple hundred hours…
Oh my god I’m so excited! This is the perfect excuse to get back into Rimworld, and these new stories sound so messed up!
That’s probably a little unethical but the mental image is absolutely hilarious.
I don’t know, if I had to guess it’s probably the return to world campaign.
With the announcement of the next monster hunter game, which is being made by the same team as world (so likely it’s going to be very similar to world) Capcom started advertising world again and that shot it up to daily peaks of ~160K concurrent players for a while.
I know the first game wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I loved it to bits! Seeing the little snippet of actual gameplay when the bridge was destroyed makes me think this will be just the first game but better, which is my favourite type of sequel, and I can’t wait! With MH Wilds and this 2025 is looking stacked already!
It really sucks that you bounced so hard. Some tips in case you ever do want to go back to it:
Enemies are puzzles too. Nearly every single enemy in the game has a specific trick to them that, once you get it down you can beat them much more easily. This includes bosses. Usually this is indicated by breaking the enemy.
Don’t worry about the races. I think I only ever won a single race in the entire game, and it has literally zero consequence other than a couple lines of dialog. It’s purely a feel good thing, and to connect you more with Emily through a friendly competition.
The story can feel a bit confusing and disconnected because there’s 2 stories happening at once: the crossworlds story and the actual story. The actual story only really starts to get serious towards the end, so until then just focus on enjoying the fake-mmo world!
If it’s not for you, it’s not for you and there’s nothing I can do about that, but I really want others to enjoy this game as much as I did because I do believe it’s something special.
Crosscode is one of my favourite games of all time. It’s an immensely charming action RPG heavily inspired by the 2D Zelda games. It has some absolutely insane combat and surprisingly challenging puzzles. The story is also very good and really touching at times. The devs spent 7 years making this game and I feel like it never got anywhere near the attention it deserved.
It’s just $20 on steam AND it has a free demo, so there’s no reason not to check it out!
Since this year is looking to be the first year in monster hunter history without a new release (ironic since it’s the 20th anniversary of the series) people have started imagining the possibility of Capcom re-releasing older monster hunter games that are no longer on the market.
As a natural continuation of this, people have speculated on how they would handle these re-releases. The most popular opinion, and one I share, is that they should absolutely not touch the game content. Modernized controls, re-opened multiplayer servers, maybe a slight graphical touch up, and if we’re getting really fancy possibly implementing multiplayer monster health scaling, but anything beyond that would be damaging the reason people want to play these games, which is that they’re the old monster hunter. They’re weird, clunky, and sometimes jank as hell but that’s their charm. They also lack all of the quality of life improvements that came in the 5th generation, however those annoyances that were whisked away come Monster Hunter World were truly part of the identity of those older games, and any new release should absolutely keep them in. It may turn away many newer hunters but it’s about preserving the history of monster hunter more than anything.
Anyways tl;dr yeah “updated for modern audiences” can be concerning regarding the preservation of the history of these games. If you mean shit like removing slurs and stuff though I’m all for it.
Fuck did we all go down the exact same pipeline? I just installed Linux last week and I haven’t booted up windows since.
OMD is a fantastic series! I remember playing the first one back on the 360, and then being sad because I didn’t have a PC to play 2 when it came out. When I eventually got a PC I sunk so many hours into the series. I’m also quite sad the series is probably over because there really isn’t anything else that fills that space. I’ve tried Sanctum but it’s just not for me.
I’ll throw my hat into this ring with Monster Hunter Rise. I often spend my time browsing monster hunter content and almost every time Rise gets brought up it’s just to talk about how much worse it is than World. I’ll say it now, yes I also prefer World to Rise, but holy fuck do I still love Rise.
To start with, let’s compare the two. Monster Hunter is developed by 2 teams who take turns making games. World was developed by the mainline team who are known for more grounded and polished games. Rise was developed by the portable team who are known for flashier and more experimental games. Most players started the Monster Hunter series with World (it’s Capcom’s #1 best selling game of all time after all) and so going from the high detail immersive World to the action packed fast paced Rise was extremely jarring. A massive portion of the hate just comes from the fact that it was different.
Also, as you can probably guess from the name, the portable team makes games for portable systems, such as the Switch, which immediately gives them less power to work with system-wise. Couple this with the fact that Rise was developed during the pandemic, and Rise was really dealt a rough hand. Graphically it’s a massive downgrade from World, and it even ended up releasing without an ending or any non-scripted elder dragon fights.
In spite of all this, even though Rise lacks a ton of the personality and charm of World, it’s still an absolute blast to play! The combat is stellar, and while it may not have the weight World had, its fluidity and high adrenaline action makes it some of the best in the series. The sunbreak expansion especially really improved the game in every single way, fixing a ton of the issues people had with the base game. I feel that most players already moved on after base Rise and so didn’t get to experience that improvement unfortunately.
TL;DR play Monster Hunter Rise. It’s really good. Just don’t go in expecting the same experience as World.
Man I loved Days Gone. I played through the whole game and deeply enjoyed it. I’m always surprised when I hear it getting shit talked online because it was really well done in my opinion. Maybe it was launch issues or something since I played it on PC long after release.
I used to just make myself in games, but then someone suggested “make a character you think looks good since you’re staring at them the whole game” so I did, and then I ended up giving them a personality after playing that game for several hundred hours. Now they’re just my oc I always play as. It sucks though because my character uses a “boy” hairstyle so any game that gender locks hair (stupid) can’t properly make her.
Would be pretty happy with Persona 5 Royal. I played it on ps4 back before I had a good PC but I never got far because playing on console is very inconvenient for me!
As for something that made me very happy recently, they finally announced the next monster hunter game, my favourite game series of all time! AND it’s finally a pc release on launch! I’m definitely upgrading my computer when that one comes around! Also I passed all my college courses that I was really worried about failing, but you know, priorities.
In the first moments of the game they give you a full summary of the plot of the first game. If you want to play the first game for the story I recommend you hold out on this one until afterwards.
Oh of course I never pre-order, but Zelda and Mario have not had any bad main games in the past decade so I don’t feel worried about buying them on release.
The Talos Principle 2 dropped an expansion out of nowhere. It hasn’t even been a year since the game released! The puzzles so far are really creative and cool, and of course it wouldn’t be The Talos Principle without a healthy dose of philosophizing about the human condition!