What are you currently playing?

[T-hawk]

Here's what I'm currently playing, bet these aren't in your Steam libraries:

   

Just had the game of my life on Rush last night, reached the final big bonus round and won it (I'd done that before, but scored quite a bit more this time.) I'm pretty much done with that one and will sell or trade it soon.

Jurassic Park is the newest arrival, a couple weeks ago, new from the factory. It needs a lot of work on adjusting things, even right out of the box, so that's next up and then I can start playing it for real.

[Gold Ergo Sum]

That's pretty dope. I think I have played most of those at my local arcade bar. I have definitely played the Rush one and GoT one for quite a while. Medieval Madness is far and away my favorite machine I have ever played. They had one at the Pinball Museum in Vegas when I was there last year and I had a hard time playing any of the other machines.

[T-hawk]

I don't like Medieval Madness, because of one particular headache in the rules. To make the final battle requires 10 troll kills. The only way to get that many is Troll Madness. That means you must complete the Trolls round *first* before or during Multiball Madness to get the Trolls component of it, or else you're locked out of that until you go all the way around through Royal Madness to get another shot. It's not all that difficult to sequence it right, but it sucks all the fun out of the first half of the game trying to do it - if you don't then you're screwed and actually worse off than when you started and may as well just start over.

My all-time favorite is Monster Bash, though I haven't seen one for sale yet nearby. I got into owning pinballs just after the remakes of that finished selling out.

[Boro]

Baldur's Gate 1, Ultima 4, Palworld, Enshrouded, even some dwarf fortress and space engineers.

This january-february has been packed for me.

[haphazard1]

Good to see someone doing the Ultima 4 Avatar thing. I did a nostalgia run through Ultima 1-5 a couple years back, it was a lot of fun. Quite the blast from my gaming past.

[Tarkeel]

Balatro just got released in full this week; I spent some time on the demo last year and have now picked it up. It's a very intersting take on the rogue-like genre: The core gameplay loop is a modified version of old-style video poker, with a very heavy emphasis on "cheating" (read: manipulating the deck). From a hand of 8 cards you select up to 5 that you can either discard or play for score to meet the target of the current round. Add in a ton of ways to modify both your deck, hand and scoring you can get some disgustingly broken combos going.

If nothing else, you should try the demo, which was enough content for a full-fledged game.

[AdrienIer]

Yeah I'm having a lot of fun with Balatro. While Slay the Spire was a deck building game, this is more of a deck modifying game but it's really fun (and challenging).

[darrelljs]

Ultima IV still has the greatest line in video game history.

Art thou dim?

I still use that to this day, although the number of people recognizing it has converged to zero.

Darrell

[T-hawk]

Yeah, I've had Ultima 4 at the back of my mind for variants like we were doing with FF1, though haven't ever gotten around to it. I had the NES version which is actually a pretty good console conversion, unlike Ultima 3 that was merely okay and 5 that was terrible on the NES. I do remember combat in 4 being slow and uninteresting though (ranged weapons kill everything before the monsters reach you); most of the game was in the exploration and discovery in the days before Gamefaqs.

[haphazard1]

Yeah, combat in Ultima 4 got pretty tedious once you had acquired a couple of companions and semi-decent gear. Most of the fun was wandering around finding things and people and learning the various secrets about where to find the rare stuff. A modern game would have all of it flagged with quest markers and automatically mapped and tracked in journals. And of course you could just look it up online.