Eyes on the Weekend (May 1-2)

In Eyes on the Weekend we share what our LifeisXbox team has been playing, most of the times we have our hands full with review games. Some of those have embargo’s so we can’t always openly share what we are playing. What is interesting for us is to see what YOU have been playing! Be sure to let us know on social media! 🙂

After reorganizing some elements in our Slack channel I took my LifeisXbox break a bit later than usual. This weekend I finally finished Outriders, still one of my favorite games of 2021. We’re almost halfway, curious if another game can beat it. (Likely Halo Infinite) We also had a friend over and played some Xbox games, in a Covid-safe way! We spend some time in Papa’s Quiz, It’s Quiz Time and the always hilarious What The Dub?!

Obviously I had some review obligations too so I played some Skate City and Dark nights With Poe and Munro, both of them will be online this week!

Managed to play two of games this weekend. The one I have to mention first will have to be DC Universe Online as I’ve spent many hours this over the past week/weekend. Really enjoyed creating some different heroes/villains but I also managed to max one of each. Even ended up buying extra character slots because I couldn’t bare to part with either one! I’m now on my fourth character. The second game I’ll mention is SMITE. Played a mixture of game modes and roles. Found an unlikely God I enjoyed, Ao Kuang, and his skin that makes him a huge ship in the air when you successfully execute someone.

I got my hands on an early preview build of Midnight Protocol. It’s a Belgian-made indie game about hacking that really makes you feel like a keyboard warrior on the dark web. Use commands to navigate nodes, break down firewalls, search for backdoors into corporate systems and find out which other actors are at play in this cyber theater. No screenshots or visuals will do the game justice, so be sure to give it a try yourself before forming an opinion, I made the same mistake and now look forward to the full release.

I started playing Donut County and almost beat it in a single sitting. Fun little diversion and I’ll definitely go for the missed achievements. The perfect type of game to play from Xbox Game Pass as it offers something new that you’ll probably never play again.Most of my gaming time this weekend was spent snapping pics of Pokémon however. New Pokémon Snap just released on Nintendo Switch and I’m having a blast. I never got to play the previous game because I never owned a Nintendo64, but I’ve been in love with videogame photography ever since playing Beyond Good & Evil and I knew this one would be right up my alley. I was not wrong.

Xen and I bought a new game to play together since we can’t see each other very much at the moment. It’s called Craftopia and been having a blast on that. It’s kinda like Minecraft but way more my style in looks. You also have to collect items or make them to progress through ages. We are on the industrial age now and I think he’s having a lot of fun building and automating everything he can! Craftopia is in early access right now! We also played some Rocket league but I’m just a filthy little ball chaser there. Still is fun though!

Due to the holiday on May 1st, I actually get a weekend I can play some games in. And games, I played. The main event was Monster Hunter Rise. I turned on the cloud save function so I could take the huntress on my switch lite to the one I’ve got docked to the television. Luckily for me, this week saw Rise’s first free title update, bringing with it a couple of new nasties to hunt. I didn’t jump into those hunts immediately however. An old, unmentioned, familiar face had also invaded the update. After showing our eruptive guest the business end of my hammer, I was off to convince returning  Elder Dragon trinity member Chameleos why becoming my next hammer isn’t a matter it has a choice in. Seeing as I got its rarest material drop after my first hunt, it must’ve agreed. Not too long after, Shadow Upon the Tempest, Kushala Daora also met its timely end due to being roughly on the same continent as me.Now, enough about my hunting exploits, I played other games as well. Both Saturday and Sunday evening was spent with my Viking brethren in Valheim. We recently got a server up and running on which we got a custom map loaded. A  scaled-down version of Europe none the less. On Thursday we decided to settle down on Bornholm. Not much happened besides a lot of terraforming. We still need to beat the second boss, the Elder, to unlock the stone cutting technology needed for decent foundations.And lastly, in the early hours of Saturday, I had another go on the Elite Dangerous Alpha, currently in phase 4. This means that we’re testing with a copy of our live game commander. So, I’ve suddenly got all my toys in the test space. All my mind-bogglingly huge ships are suddenly at my beck and call. Much to the detriment of local small settlements all over. The awe I felt while marvelling at my cruise liner sized ships was soon interrupted however because for the first time in all the alpha my performance took a major hit while close to any of the new settlements. Now, I know improvements and optimizations are bound for the live release on May 19th, so I will hold out until then.