Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page

I've got a fairly stable collection of regular games. Not quite so stable that they haven't changed since I was last posting to Blogger in 2008 - that would be a bit much. Mind you, Hellgate: London was one of the last things I posted about before moving over to KiaSA, and I just saw news that its creator has announced a new Hellgate title is in the works. It seems the original has been tweaked and re-released a few times, I was almost tempted to grab the current version from Steam, but a tenner seems a little steep for what would likely be a brief nostalgia hit rather than a serious diversion.

War Thunder is a bit more recent and has received considerably more updates, thundering along in a warlike fashion into its eleventh year. This year's April not-exactly-Fool's event was an apocalyptic resource gathering and crafting affair, Mad Thunder, bringing elements of Crossout into the game. Lightly armoured vehicles with automatic weapons made life nasty, brutish, and short so the mode was fun and frustrating in fairly equal measure - one round with a couple of good kills and a large haul of crafting materials was almost inevitably followed by another of immediate death to unseen opponents with nothing to show for  it. I crafted a couple of new vehicles and might have dabbled further, but as it was only around for a month it didn't seem worth devoting too much time to. Otherwise I try and get a few battles in each week flitting between modes and nations - British ships, Swedish tanks, French aircraft.

Speaking of fun and frustrating, Marvel Snap also fits that bill. I tend to find a deck I like and stick with it - between the randomness of the hand you draw, your opponent's deck, and the locations that appear there's plenty of variety. It's not ideal to get too set in your ways, though, and the game seems to have an uncanny ability to send me on a terrible losing streak, either with a shift in the meta or just a run of bad luck, to the point that I'm on the verge of quitting. I'll grudgingly sort out something new (usually dusting off a previous deck and slotting in a couple of the hot new card gets them competitive again), and frequently get on a hot streak and shoot up the ranks. There's probably some psychological element, like the other queue always moving faster, but it's kept me playing. The small decks and quick matches are a real plus point; it's entirely supplanted KARDS for my card gaming as I found the meta there shifting towards lengthy matches of attrition, with decks of 40 cards from a choice of around 800 needing rather more effort to build and test. 

Around other games I still tend to have Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms idling along in the background. I wasn't sure about its longevity, but three years on it turns out that Making Numbers Go Up still works for me. There are (very) long term goals of hitting some Really Big Numbers (Complete 200 variants! Collect 1000 feats! Acquire 1.00e14 influence!), with regular releases of new characters providing more immediate content while working towards them. Also regularly releasing new characters is Marvel Puzzle Quest - you might've thought they'd be running out with 300+ already in the game, but between some pretty deep cuts ("Hit-Monkey possesses the normal attributes of an Earth Japanese macaque, which includes superhuman agility and reflexes") and multiple versions of better known characters (good old multiverse!) the well runs deep. It's still my mobile game of choice, alongside 2048 Ultimate as a sort of fidget-swiper par excellence during calls and similar (up to 8,388,608 in one square so far!)

Destiny 2 had been a regular for a good while but fell out of rotation a few years back; it recently got an update, Into The Light, with a new Onslaught activity pitting players against waves of mobs. It generated some positive buzz so I got it patched up to have a nose around, and enjoyed a bit of blasting. I'm not sure I'm motivated enough to start on the heavy admin - working out a build, finding weapons with particular perks, touring the Tower for bounties and the rest, but it scratched an itch and might be something I head back to.

Aside from the regulars a light dabble in Fortnite didn't last too long - Festival Mode didn't grab me like Guitar Hero 3 had back in 2008. Saints Row 4 was more diverting, but got a little same-y after a while, so when a decent bundle of Mechwarrior 5 and its DLC turned up in a sale I picked that up to clamber back into a 'Mech cockpit for the first time since Mechwarrior Online back in 2013; I'd loved the rest of the Mechwarrior series but could never get into MWO. For some reason I hadn't got around to MW5 before, but that allowed for plenty of improvements and additional content. It was most enjoyable to work through the main campaign, building up a collection of increasingly heavy 'mechs. I carried on for a while after completing the story, but with a couple of reliable lances of assault 'mechs things got a little humdrum, so I had a look around for something else. Midnight Suns was another game I'd had my eye on for a while that popped up on sale with its DLC, so I grabbed that and it's proving... interesting. More on that next time when I'll hopefully have finished it.