Which Game Did You Buy Last?

My reasons for starting this are twofold: To log my purchases in a way that I don't see the bank statements and feel bad if I haven't played it (or in other words: intervention and accountability), and also as a general curiosity about what the community is doing, like with our two "what are you playing" threads of the positive and general variety.

So, to kick this off...

Lego DC Super-Villains for the Switch; mainly as an impulse buy because it's on sale for $9 digitally (same for the PC version on Humble, though also not for very long as of this post), but I think pretty positively of the DC villains and the Lego games seem pretty good thee days, in moderation, and the Switch is awesome, so hopefully this doesn't become one of my many, many "straight to the backlog" purchases thanks to my bad habit of online shopping when I get bored and being susceptible to time-sensitive high percentage discounts.

The last thing I bought was We Are OFK. Liking it a lot so far. It's more of a tv show than it is a game really. Very minimal gameplay and it's being released episodically in one-hour chunks, but it's messy gay drama about game devs trying to start a band and each episode has its own music video, so I'm here for it.

I've been on a rhythm game tear so I just bought the big song pack DLC for Project Diva Megamix on Steam and modded the hell out of it.

Following that I saw Project Heartbeat which is a community driven clone of Project Diva so I had to see how fucked up these people are at making charts (Very). It has all the problems of Mario Maker with creators that don't understand difficulty scaling beyond what they've perfected after hundreds of hours but it's a lot of fun for like seven dollars.

I actually don't have one game that I bought because I had a PlayStation store cart with stuff from the most recent sales that I put through so they were all purchased at once. The entire purchase was a little less than $25.

Bulletstorm Duke Nukem Bundle: One of my favorite shooters from the 360. Is the addition of Duke Nukem enough to make it worth playing through again? Not sure but for under $5 I am willing to find out. I really loved this game's campaign and there's nothing quite like its scoring system, or the whip and boot mechanics.

Gauntlet Slayer Edition: I actually had this via PS+ but I sometimes buy games I have on subscription services at a heavy discount just to keep them if I ever drop the service. I just started playing it recently after trying a couple times prior and giving up because it was too hard, but this time the mechanics clicked and I really enjoyed it. You cannot play it like old Gauntlet games you need to use the various abilities or you will be overwhelmed, but once you figure out the rhythm of those abilities it's a lot of fun and scratches that old Gauntlet: Dark Legacy itch. The kind of game I will chip away at for years to come.

Worms Rumble Digital Deluxe: Eh. I kind of like Worms and even though this is a weird offshoot maybe it's worth checking out? It was cheap. I don't know this was probably a bad purchase.

Magicka 2: Special Edition: Magicka is a series that it seems like I would really like but I've never quite gotten up the energy to try it. Hopeully soon.

Strange Brigade Digital Deluxe: A third person shooter I always kind of had my eye on but thought was probably too janky for me, until I saw Metal Jesus Rocks praise the Switch version and it looked much better put together than I thought. Since this is the PS4 version I thought it would run better than Switch, and at 95% off it seemed like a good bet. I actually played through the first level this morning and...it's not fantastic but it's solid enough to be fun and in HDR on my PS4 it looks pretty nice. I've mostly been playing 2D games recently so just playing a 3D shooter with detailed graphics was fun. At $80 this package would be ludicrously overpriced but for $4 plus tax I'll probably get my money's worth playing through the campaign and messing around with some of the horde stuff and maybe a little multiplayer. I will say that it does suffer from the old Jeff Gerstmann issue of old guns being not that fun. The default gun is inaccurate and underpowered, but apparently they are upgrades so hopefully I'll be able to get some of those. Kind of feels like Serious Sam if that game were a third person shooter, though not nearly as intense and balls to the wall. Maybe it's just that the opening level is Egypt themed.

As you can see I love cheap special editions. I don't know that I'll play a ton of all of these or even play all of them at all, but with each being $5 or less that's not so important to me. I do know that both Gauntlet and Strange Brigade are currently in my rotation and so far I like them both, and Bulletstorm is at the very least a tip to the devs for a game I genuinely loved. Probably could have done without Worms and maybe Magicka, but who knows, and I do have a tendency to unearth old purchases from years ago and play through them. I bought Oceanhorn 5 years ago and I just played through it this week, finishing yesterday, so just because I don't play it immediately doesn't mean I won't. Heck Gauntlet has been in my PS+ library since 2015 and I'm just starting to really warm to it now. Especially now that fewer and fewer games are pushing the graphics envelope I just don't mind going back to older games.

I bought Tinykin as soon as I finished the quick look, and no regrets there.

The game is pretty cool, with a lot of imagination put into the environments.

The last game I bought was the Superhot bundle on steam since it was on sale.

It's a great simple game with a good core gameplay and good story. 😁

i'm that guy that ponied up a hot $70 for the new TLOU edition.

i wouldn't recommend it to most people- but if you're a TLOU sicko like i am (or haven't played it before), it's a pretty rad version of the game- i'm having a blast!

FF7R Steam edition, it was great. I might have bought FF6 Pixel Remaster and/or Hades since then, I can't recall.

Horizon: Forbidden West during the Summer sale. It was at a decent price where it was cheaper than both the PS4 and PS5 versions. And since I've been waiting for the price to drop, I thought this might be the best time to get it. Haven't regretted it. Great game.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3, enjoying it although it's doing the thing all Xenoblade games do where every 5 hours more and more mechanics that get introduced and it gets reeeeeaaal complicated.

Still super fun though!

Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition.

I figured they have to be done working on it by now right? Its interesting, seeing the pacing of this game and trying to imagine what they were expecting people to intuit and figure out. I'm level 56 and just now heading into the big Leviathan summoning sequence.

seen bug fables leaving gamepass later in the month and heard it was a good paper mario style game so .... i bought that ... i've been meaning to play it for about a yr so now that i own it i can put it off a bit longer vs rushing to beat it on gamepass in a weeks time. on the bright side it was on sale for 7 and change on indiegala which is about half as much as it being on sale in other places

Just a heads up. I could be wrong, but the last time I played through and beat the game, which was earlier this year, I noticed that the final DLC episode Ardyn didn't come with the Royal Edition as it was released after it. I had to buy it separately. Luckily it was on sale at the time for 2 dollars. If you're looking to experience everything, then keep this in mind. The Ardyn episode does tie up some loose ends, if you care about the story.

On a technicality, the last game I bought was Horizon Forbidden West, because a code was packed in with the PS5 that I finally was able to purchase. I didn't want it, but they don't seem to be selling the non-bundled version of the console any longer. Stray was the last game I bought for its own merits.

Fire Pro Wrestling World for some wrastlin' on the Steam Deck

TMNT Cowabunga Collection

Elden Ring. And at the rate it's taking me to get through it I may not buy anything else until 2023.

Temtem, which hit 1.0 a couple weeks ago. I’ve been enjoying playing what is essentially Pokémon on an Xbox, and it’s got way fewer cutscenes aand plodding dialogue than modern Pokémon games. It’s pretty grindy at times though.

Judgement.

Been very worth it so far.

I initially felt like an idiot because I’ve been talking shit about the NBA 2K series for almost a decade at this point…but I was VERY curious about the new Eras feature and it is legitimately fantastic.

One of my longest running complaints about the franchise has been how it’s roots are in the plodding, post-up strategies of the late 90s and early 2000s yet all the modern players are of roughly equal height, speed and shooting skill which leads to a court that feels nebbish and clotted.

Turns out turning back the clock to 1983 solves a LOT of those problems. The CPU never shoots threes, it’s exhilarating for a draft to be around the corner and think you might have a shot at Patrick Ewing rather than, I dunno, Giannis Harden, the white kid from Tuscaloosa with an Afro.

They even have a bunch of era specific commentary, the rule changes and team relocations occur as they did in real life (although you can override them - San Diego, you’re welcome for the Clippers!) all the way down to uniform changes…but everything else is up in the air. Michael Jordan plays for my Seattle SuperSonics, John Stockton is a Houston Rocket…it’s gonna be fascinating just to experience this alternate history. What I’m most curious about right now but haven’t looked up: will players like Jordan always look like 1983 Jordan in this mode? Players have never “aged” in that way before but this game has the player models for most of these historical players to make it happen…I’m hesitantly optimistic and so far haven’t looked up the answer.

I hate to say it but NBA 2K23 is a very, very good basketball game this year.

Madden NFL 23 unfortunately. I haven't played a significant amount of Madden since 18 so I figured I'd jump in this year. Even with all the negative reviews, I still bought it and, yeah, the game's got issues. I was actually enjoying myself playing Face of the Franchise. Won a Super Bowl for the Jets but then a glitch happened and reset my progress.

Also played a little of the Ultimate Team. Just completing challenges but I'm so confused as to what to do in that mode without spending extra money on microtransactions. It's a bummer because I like the equivalent mode, Diamond Dynasty, in MLB The Show.

I'll probably try Franchise next but I'm a little concerned with the save issues I've seen. Definitely wouldn't recommend especially at the current price for the Series X version.

@nodima: Okay but what are the micro transactions like? I've stayed away from the 2K series for awhile because in reviews it seemed like the microtransactions were infecting even the single player modes, and not just on a cosmetic level.

@bigsocrates: Game launches, ad for in-game rigamarole calls out to you like it's Times Square in the late '70s (or present day), press circle (or equivalent), move on. All of the NBA geek stuff doesn't care if you're a teenage dishwasher or failed legal clerk. Just do it, as they say.

I'll add to this post because it's too late to add to the other one that I get why the card collection games are what they are, as hooked to MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty as I am. And I'm sure an enterprising hooper could've set something like this up in years past. Again, I'm in a slow process of finding out how these players actually grow, hoping it's a combination of destiny and swell team building.

But I get why Owen S. Good and some others are eager to crown this game. It feels good on the court, and the old basketball looks really good through the historic filters thanks in no small part to the authentic presentation - or lack thereof - it's a little stunning how the authenticity of the mid-80s broadcast filter makes piercing a pair of towering PF and C for a layup but no and-1 look regular.

Edit: If anything, I worry that this is still purely a money sink for the younger hoop lover, and that if I'd started a current day MyNBA save I'd be more mad than fascinated by the game, same as I've been for years.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 1 for Switch.

This is a re-buy, but I was only playing the Steam version on my laptop when my maternal grandmother was brought over for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I would have just bought it for the Switch and called it a day, but I bought the game in June of 2019 while me getting a Switch in September of that year wasn't really planned.

Slime Rancher 2. And let me tell you, boy is it comfy.

Trombone Champ of course

AC Rogue and AC Unity on Xbox when they were on sale.

Judgment and Lost Judgment for PC.

Last month: Elden Ring for Steam, thanks to Green Man Gaming knocking $10 off.

A few hours ago: Hot Wheels Unleashed; and not just some of the Hot Wheels: All of the Hot Wheels since all of the DLC got bundled into one purchase back in September.

Tunic. It's good. Stuck on a couple bosses but I feel that I am slowly making progress against them. I just wish that damn fox moved a little faster.

God of War Ragnarök. The rare pre-order, available to play exactly 25 hours from now. I bought the last one on sale well after release, and enjoyed it enough that this time I don't want to wait and feel they've earned my money.

Witch On the Holy Night, preordered after the demo. Let my year of Type-Moon conclude with another big one.

WRC Generations, which is the final game in the series to be developed by Kylotonn & published by Nacon before they pass their licensing to Codemasters.