2026 VIDEO GAMES CATCH ALL THREAD

[Contentious C]

1 hour ago, Cliff Hanger said:

I really need to get around to Midnight Suns, which I've owned for ages. But I QP'd because I have really been missing Marvel Heroes, a podcast game par excellence. I still involuntarily quote the stupid Taskmaster commercial at people who have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about nearly 9 years after it went down.

"I am the very model of a modern Major General / and something something something and I don't remember all the words!" -- I only ever heard Deadpool say that line once in a Marvel Heroes hub, but it's seared into my mind forever how perfectly they captured his humor.

I only vaguely remember the Taskmaster commercial. The Madame Hydra chapter 2 cutscene I recall more clearly.

But yeah, give Midnight Suns a spin.

Edited May 31 by Contentious C

[odessasteps]

Magik is fun, esp if you imagine her as Raven from teen titans. 

[RIPPA]

I decided to try Vampire Crawlers

Now I remember why this is so fucking addictive

It 30 minutes of gameplay - I think I got 15-16 achievements

I also noticed that Mixtape is on GamePass. Not sure I am emotionally ready for that

[Zimbra]

On 5/30/2026 at 1:17 PM, supremebve said:

I recommended it here before, but if Dragon Quest Builders 2 makes you happy, play Pokepia if you have a Switch 2.  I've never given a single solitary fuck about a Pokemon, but that game is somewhere between Dragon Quest Builders and Animal Crossing in the best combination possible.  

Oh, I have considered buying a Switch 2 just for Pokopia, but common sense says I have to wait until my Switch and Steamdeck both die.

[Casey]

4 hours ago, RIPPA said:

I decided to try Vampire Crawlers

Now I remember why this is so fucking addictive

It 30 minutes of gameplay - I think I got 15-16 achievements

I also noticed that Mixtape is on GamePass. Not sure I am emotionally ready for that

A fun experiment eventually, if you keep playing: You can literally break the game if your hand is big enough and that gets you quite a few achievements that are loosely associated with how you get to that point, and it triggers something special.

I've put at least 30 hours into the game since I bought it at launch. I like it WAY more than Vampire Survivors, but I'm also a sucker for card games.

[J.T.]

5 hours ago, RIPPA said:

I also noticed that Mixtape is on GamePass. Not sure I am emotionally ready for that

I think I will play Mixtape and leave a positive comment just to spite the review bombing assholes out there.

[supremebve]

25 minutes ago, J.T. said:

I think I will play Mixtape and leave a positive comment just to spite the review bombing assholes out there.

I played a bit.  I will say this, the review bombers are assholes, but it doesn't mean they don't have a point.  It's not a terrible game, but rating that game a 10 out of 10 is like giving Fruity Pebbles a Michelin Star.  Sure, you might like Fruity Pebbles, you might like them a whole lot, but that's not really what this award is about.  So, when you give Fruity Pebbles the award, you kind of have to see the food snobs coming to shit on that decision.  

[J.T.]

3 hours ago, supremebve said:

I played a bit.  I will say this, the review bombers are assholes, but it doesn't mean they don't have a point.  It's not a terrible game, but rating that game a 10 out of 10 is like giving Fruity Pebbles a Michelin Star.  Sure, you might like Fruity Pebbles, you might like them a whole lot, but that's not really what this award is about.  So, when you give Fruity Pebbles the award, you kind of have to see the food snobs coming to shit on that decision.  

This may be one of the best analogies I have ever seen.

I totally agree that quality is not relative, but it appears as though the prevailing argument behind the negative reviews is fueled by distrust of the absolutely glowing reviews from various media sources (which the blob feels are bought and paid for and they might have a point). There's also the fact that Annapurna's CEO is the daughter of the CEO of Oracle.  Sure, it stinks of nepotism but that really doesn't have fuck all to do with whether or not Mixtape is a good game. And yeah, Annapurna's CEO is a lesbian blah blah blah LGBTQ+ blah blah blah woke blah blah broke blah blah. 

Few of the negative reviews that I have seen, if any, actually cite any specific issues with the gameplay. Mixtape is boring and practically plays itself you say? So does Sakura Swim Club and that shit has a 9/10 user rating? I wonder why?

Oh yeah, that's why. 

Then, there is the idea that for whatever reason, a person not born in the 90's is incapable of making a game set in the 90's. You may as well say that Michael York should not have played D'Artagnan in the 1973 adaptation of The Three Musketeers because he is neither French nor a trained swordsman nor was he born in 1800's. Not only is this patently stupid, it also kinda gives away the relative age of the detractors. I have met the enemy and the enemy probably drinks Ensure nutrition shakes like I do.

What a sad state of affairs to be caught in the middle of. In the war between compromised industry plants and fiftysomething anti-woke gooners, do you really want to pick a side?

With both sides of the argument being inherently disingenuous, the only person whose opinion matters is the end customer's. It'd be nice to be able to get some idea on what you're getting into without having to spend your own cash, but that seems to be a luxury here in the era of echo chambers and opaque bubbles.

Edited June 3 by J.T.

[odessasteps]

7 hours ago, RIPPA said:

I decided to try Vampire Crawlers

Now I remember why this is so fucking addictive

It 30 minutes of gameplay - I think I got 15-16 achievements

I also noticed that Mixtape is on GamePass. Not sure I am emotionally ready for that

Started it a week or two ago. Fine for what it is so far. 

[SirSmUgly]

I dropped Crawlers for Ball X Pit. Crawlers is an okay podcast game, but it doesn't have that addictive gameplay for me. I've been playing BxP with Hades 2 and Balatro sprinkled in.

I've started collecting '90s GamePros and EGMs over the past few months. That led me to finding out that a previewed game in the overseas section, then named Spark, was eventually renamed Pulseman and released initially only in Japan before later being released on the Wii Channel and then again on the Genesis NSO app. I grabbed my OG Switch and fired that up in bed a couple times.

It's a Game Freak game that, like the more modern Game Freak game Tembo the Badass Elephant, is very much an attempt at 2D Sonic gameplay. In the case of Pulseman, it harkens back to Sonic CD., specifically by asking you to quickly gain sprint speed in small or uneven spaces so that you can explore the level. In CD, you do that to activate the timeposts. In Pulse, you do that to build up electricity and fire off into spark form, which makes you invincible and allows you to climb vertically and reach otherwise unreachable places (or hit otherwise unhittable bosses).

Like Tembo, it looks great from an art direction standpoint, but it just makes me wish I were playing the actual good Sonic games that it's aping more than it drives me to play more of it. I am going to mess with it more and probably start playing more Genesis games in general. I have an actual Genesis that I should yank out of storage and set up this summer, but probably I will mostly use Genesis NSO.

[Tabe]

14 hours ago, supremebve said:

I played a bit.  I will say this, the review bombers are assholes, but it doesn't mean they don't have a point.  It's not a terrible game, but rating that game a 10 out of 10 is like giving Fruity Pebbles a Michelin Star.  Sure, you might like Fruity Pebbles, you might like them a whole lot, but that's not really what this award is about.  So, when you give Fruity Pebbles the award, you kind of have to see the food snobs coming to shit on that decision.  

Yeah, even the positive reviews say stuff like "a really boring game to play through", "gameplay is meh", "the lack of actual game", etc.  

Edited June 3 by Tabe

[odessasteps]

As I said the other day, it doesn’t have (so far) the magical realism of Lost Records, which I thought was okay but not great. 

[supremebve]

1 hour ago, odessasteps said:

As I said the other day, it doesn’t have (so far) the magical realism of Lost Records, which I thought was okay but not great. 

I'd describe it as a game about kids you knew in high school but you weren't really friends with.  The kind of kids you would hang out with if you both happened to be at an amusement park at the same time, but you'd never plan to go to the amusement park with them.  The game is about an adjacent friend group.  The game even points out that you'd probably like hanging out with the main character's older sister's friends than this group.  

[Contentious C]

I've gone pretty far down the rabbit hole on Midnight Suns, and I wish I got it sooner. I seem to recall Marvel Heroes was also done in Unreal Engine, and it seems like these guys recycled a LOT of details from that for some of the scut work. It's especially true for random drops around the hub, which are almost identical to crafting mat drops in Marvel Heroes (despite the fact that MH's studio no longer exists).

I have 2 big issues. First, the voice acting for the main is *terrible*. Male or female, doesn't matter. Part of that is the dishwater writing (again, a problem mostly for the main, Nico and Robbie especially are aces in this), but Matt Mercer, who I'm sure has lots of fans in both the VA and D&D realms, just does not do it at all here. So so so bad.

Second, for FUCK'S SAKE, someone, anyone, record a *different* dog bark for a dog! This is the exact same bark as fucking *Skyrim*. Of all the assets to recycle, you chose *that*?!?!?

Edited June 3 by Contentious C

[odessasteps]

You don't like Magik sounding like Natasha Fatale? 

[Cliff Hanger]

Sony may regret letting Hamster put platinum trophies in Arcade Archive 2 releases; from first boot to Plat took me 33 minutes (and that involved finishing the game on all the modes with leader boards rather than suiciding as soon as I'd gotten everything in that mode.) Still a really fun game; there aren't a lot of these ACA releases where I give a damn about leaderboards but this one I really do love.

[Dragon]

On 4/24/2026 at 7:21 PM, Dragon said:

You might get Tifa in Street Fighter 6.

https://www.gamereactor.eu/official-final-fantasys-tifa-joins-street-fighter-6s-year-4-1730503/

[Cliff Hanger]

BIG risk for SF6 year 4. Not Tifa, she has plenty of fans who will throw some bread on the table. But packing her with 3 new Nayshalli chars (Bosch appears in the World Tour story but was created for SF6, the other two are brand new) isn't what any of us wanted. I'm sure I'll end up buying the set, and I'll probably end up liking them. But i'm not excited the way I was for years 2 and 3.

[odessasteps]

 

[Eivion]

Beat Act V of Diablo II Resurrected a couple of nights ago. It felt weird that Baal was so much damn easier to fight than DIablo & Mephisto. On the other hand I was also a hell of a lot stronger and having a Valkyrie makes shit so much easier. Did a brief start of Nightmare before moving on to DIablo 3.

Its been years since I played so it felt pretty damn jarring to go from II's remake to 3. The systems are just so different despite similarities. I am thankful there is a lot more light. The darkness even on the remake in II just made it annoying to play sometimes (daytime in particular). Started with the Demon Hunter since I never played it the first time around. The character always felt a bit too edgelord for me, but I do enjoy it, especially once you use two crossbows. It speeds up combat so damn much.

[Cliff Hanger]

Failed a saving throw against buying Dragon Quest 1+2 while it's on sale. In 1989, I was 12 and I played my first ever RPG: the NES part of Ultima III. It was too much for me, but it was exciting and felt like a game to grow into. Dragon Warrior, meanwhile, felt too stripped down, a "baby game for babies" as the millennials used to say. Final Fantasy came a year or so later and hit the sweet spot to really get me into the genre.

Now i'm fucking old, and the baby game for babies has become cozy while Exodus went from "a game I will grow into" to "who the fuck has time for all this shit" without me ever existing in the sweet spot to love it. (I did eventually love Quest of the Avatar, but it's the only one in the series that I ever finished...or even came close to finishing.)

Anyway, it's weird to get this kind of "OMG my childhood!" vibe from a game I played and rejected when it was new, and yet here I am. 

[Eivion]

10 hours ago, Cliff Hanger said:

Failed a saving throw against buying Dragon Quest 1+2 while it's on sale. In 1989, I was 12 and I played my first ever RPG: the NES part of Ultima III. It was too much for me, but it was exciting and felt like a game to grow into. Dragon Warrior, meanwhile, felt too stripped down, a "baby game for babies" as the millennials used to say. Final Fantasy came a year or so later and hit the sweet spot to really get me into the genre.

Now i'm fucking old, and the baby game for babies has become cozy while Exodus went from "a game I will grow into" to "who the fuck has time for all this shit" without me ever existing in the sweet spot to love it. (I did eventually love Quest of the Avatar, but it's the only one in the series that I ever finished...or even came close to finishing.)

Anyway, it's weird to get this kind of "OMG my childhood!" vibe from a game I played and rejected when it was new, and yet here I am. 

Did you pick up the remakes? I picked them and 3 up earlier in the year. They were good fun. The added a lot of extra bits of story and character to 2 in particular. Keep in mind if you have an interest in playing them in order of timeline then its 3-1-2.

[Cliff Hanger]

1 hour ago, Eivion said:

Did you pick up the remakes? I picked them and 3 up earlier in the year. They were good fun. The added a lot of extra bits of story and character to 2 in particular. Keep in mind if you have an interest in playing them in order of timeline then its 3-1-2.

Thanks, I know 3 is a prequel. Yeah, I got the 1+2 remakes, and got 1+2 first because I wanted something smaller and more manageable after failing to finish Infinite Wealth. I'm not very far yet, just got back from the Rain Shrine. But it's a real good "relax and grind" game, last night i had it up on the Portal and watched the Tonys.

[Dragon]

My Asian fever is overloading 

[Matt D]

Finally playing Tunic. The "secrets around every corner" vibe to it is very much down my alley. Some of it is infuriating since the backtracking, unlike other metroidvanias (and it's a zeldametroidvania with souls elements or whatever) are because there are things you could possibly do but you don't know you can do them yet. That's nefarious, but it hits your brain differently than any other game I've ever played.