So, what are you playing?
[Conan Exiles]
The head of the ESA is preparing to square off against the head of the NRA over gun violence. Facebook launched a dedicated section to video game live streams and other game-related content. And there’s only 51 weeks until E3 2019, folks—but you can catch our complete coverage of this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo by typing "E3 2018" into the search bar at the top of the page.
So, what are you playing?
Sean Colleli
I am deliciously, exquisitely poor right now—planning/funding a wedding has that fun side effect—so it's probably back to some retrogaming on my RetroPie builds this weekend. I'll probably run through Metroid Fusion again, and I'd like to catch up on my Game Gear backlog; I've heard that library has a lot of forgotten gems. Then again I might just spend several hours re-imaging my RetroPies, as I tend to get perfectionist about it and take more time tweaking the builds than actually playing with them.
Dave Gamble
While I have my normal routines reestablished after a flurry of reviews that took a couple of weeks to get through, there’s still room in my day to have a relaxing session with Moss, also in for review. If you had asked me whether or not VR could have any kind of positive impact on a platformer, I would have said no. I would have been wrong. Admittedly, VR in this case doesn’t offer up the same visceral experience one would get with a racing or flight sim, but it does still manage to make you feel like you are an integral part of the game. Perhaps it’s the scale—I feel like a normal-sized human sitting down to play with a real lab mouse; or maybe it’s the depth of the area, rather than a flat picture that does it, but if I was given a choice between playing flat or VR, it would be VR every time.
Eric Hauter
I have cleared everything off of my plate in order to spend some time in Conan Exiles for PlayStation 4. While I am saddened at the lack of naked people on PlayStation (come on, Sony, haven't you ever heard of a little something called God of War?), I am still enjoying the game in an "It's so bad it's good" sort of way. The UI is a disaster, the gameplay is buggy, the graphics glitch all over the place, and yet...I'm really having fun.
I spent a good deal of time this weekend carving out a safe area on a cliff overlooking the river, where I have built a simple house. I have now added a bed and some basic crafting tools to my house, and am happily (but slowly) building myself a set of basic armor out of the hides of some strange desert-dwelling turtle men that my son and I have named "dummies."
Every morning, I wake up, stretch my legs, climb down the cliff and proceed to go on a genocidal rampage against the local dummy population, blasting them in the face with my dull stone sword, stealing their eggs and eating their young. Dummies beware, the half-clothed she-raven of despair is watching in the dark from her cliff on high, plotting the deaths of your babies! I shall rip your flesh from your bones! I shall rip the hides from your backs! I shall turn your children into a pair of ugly but functional gloves!
So yes, I'm having a good time with Conan Exiles.
I also picked up a copy of Battlefront II on sale this weekend. Whatever.
Randy Kalista
With so many sequels and sequel-adjacent games announced at E3, you'd think I'd dig into the crates and replay a few favorites. Announce Fallout 76? Play some Fallout 4. Show some Skull & Bones? Raise the Black Flag. Teaser for The Elder Scrolls VI? Well, I never stopped playing The Elder Scrolls V, so that doesn't count. My point was going to be, though, that I don't want to reinstall those old favorites. I need some cognitive distance between those oldies and the upcoming titles. I don't want to burn out on any one series' gameplay before the next one hits.
So, for my VRidge (phone VR thing) review, what I'm actually playing is: Figure out how to steer my not-as-arcadey-as-World-of-Tanks tank in War Thunder, figure out how to get the HUD to a readable resolution in Elite Dangerous, and figure out my role in polygonal hunting narrative Colosse.
Rob Larkin
I’ve been holding off on a new game because it’s my first Father's Day upcoming and already know my present: God of War. I pitched the idea to my wife after she watched the Conan Clueless Gamer review of the game and how it had those father and son overtones dysfunctional as they might be and she took the bait. So I’ll be neck deep in the new God of War for the foreseeable future.
Nicholas Leon
I've actually just restarted playing Fallout Shelter on my phone, and oh my gosh am I loving it. I don't usually play mobile games, as I don't tend to view them with as high a regard as the ones on console and PC. But I think that with the backing of Bethesda Game Studios as developer, it really helps the game shine on the mobile market. I am seriously liking it.
