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StrixNebulosa posted:I'm not hardcore enough for IVAN! Story time! The first boss in IVAN is a giant man-eating plant that's super deadly in melee range and mostly harmless outside of it. One of the first times I reached it I still didn't know much about the game, but I had gotten lucky with some nice weapons and armor and thought I had a chance. I started trading blows with it and within the first three hits the plant bit one of my legs off, so at that point I'm committed to the fight because my armor encumbered me too much to get away on one leg. I keep fighting and it bites my weapon arm off, sending my axe (and arm) flying across the room, so I'm stuck rummaging through my bag for anything that might help. I zap a random wand at it and it's a wand of acid rain, which begins pouring on the plant AND me because I'm in melee range. The acid dissolves my remaining arm and leg... and kills the giant plant. So there I am, my first kill on the first boss of the game, and I'm lying there on the cave floor amidst pools of blood and acid as a limbless torso. I started praying in the hopes that the gods would give me at least one limb back, and while I'm doing that, my puppy (which you start with and somehow survived the carnivorous plant and acid torrent) decides to feast upon the dissolved corpse of the boss. He steps through the tile my torso lump is on, rolling me into the acid puddle next to where I landed. Unable to move, I melt and die in an inch-deep pool of acid I had conjured. You don't have to be hardcore to enjoy IVAN. You have to be willing to let IVAN go hardcore on you. Also since we're talking about roguelikes (and I hate the attempted distinction between rogue-lites and roguelikes yes I will fight you) did you guys know that both Delver and Darkwood (  for ladybutt) are finally going to leave Early Access? Possibly as soon as next month?
Too Shy Guy fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 19:46
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That Guy Bob posted:Might wanna NSFW that Darkwood link, its got a nice lady butt in it. My bad! I work at an anime porn factory so I mentally gloss over these things. Ceyton posted:Yeah right, I'll believe it when I see it. I have no doubt they're going to exit Early Access, but I'm very curious to see if they're actually complete games when they do.
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Jul 27, 2017 20:25
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dmboogie posted:is this something, you can elaborate, on, This is just for you, nobody else mouse over it. I work for an asian MMO publisher. A few years ago I did apply to work at a manga publisher that I didn't research beforehand, and it turned out they almost exclusively published porn. Unfortunately I never heard back from them.
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Jul 27, 2017 21:24
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Soul Glo posted:This might be the right place to ask: You might already be familiar with this but it's worth mentioning that Titan Quest is on sale for $4 right now and is very much Diablo 2.5, just set in ancient Greece and Egypt fighting mythical monsters. I wrote a whole bunch more about it if you're interested.
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Jul 28, 2017 17:23
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Alright, I'm going to so something I wasn't expecting to do. I'm going to make a case for Arcen's Skyward Collapse because I've been playing a shitload of it this past week. It's definitely not for everyone, but if you're like me it's weirdly compelling and well worth $1.24.   It's not hard to find games with great ideas and poor executions. Having a great or unique concept is only the first step to translating that into a great game, and the path there is rarely clear or easy. That's what I was expecting going into Skyward Collapse, based on what buzz there was surrounding it. But what I got was something far more engaging than that, something that filled its concept out and gave me plenty to do with it. It's still not a perfect or even great treatment, but it's enough to keep me playing. In Skyward Collapse you are some kind of divine force, overseeing a world coming together piece by piece. There are two burgeoning societies in this floating realm, pulled straight from tales of Greek and Norse antiquity. They don't particularly care for each other, though, and given the chance they will wipe the other out as quickly as possible. Your charge is to help them BOTH flourish, without annihilating the other... at least for a time. So yes, the hook here is "turn-based strategy" against yourself. Every turn you have three actions you can perform for the red side, building structures or casting god powers, and then three actions for the blue side. Once you've taken all your actions the little mortals take over, producing their own militaries from the resources and structures you help them set up, and then marching out to murder each other. You have nearly no control over units once they are produced, aside from some basic rally and upgrade powers. That means the challenge is not found in battle, but in the logistics supplying each side. The overly clever readers among you may have already raised a finger to interject, supposing that you could just NOT produce soldiers from either side and live in forced harmony. It's not that simple, of course, because each game takes place over three eras of lots of other poo poo happening. Bandits, warlords, and monsters can (and will) emerge from the forests and caves of the world to destroy the towns you've worked so hard to grow. There are also woes which strike the world every dozen turns or so, inflicting plagues, disasters, and other horrors that may need a military to deal with. And then from the second era, literal gods descend to the continent to take a hand in matters themselves. Rounding things out is a scoring system that gives points for conflict and destruction, and you have quotas to meet to reach future eras and win the game.    You can't get by without building troops and defenses for your towns, and as situations spiral out of control you can dig deeper and deeper into your bag of frankly ridiculous divine tricks. On a basic level you can upgrade key units, bless your settlements with emergency resources, or lay new tiles of land to benefit the side in need. Once you get more established you can drop mythical creatures like minotaurs and valkyries to bolster your armies, or divine blessings that provide huge bonuses to the troops that reach them (and we're talking like 100x damage or 5x attacks per turn here). And then there are special tokens and god powers with global effects, like cloning every unit on the map, dropping 20 invulnerable minotaurs randomly, or annihilating every unit in existence. Your insane god powers are the real highlight of the game, and also what illustrate Skyward Collapse's greatest weakness. In my first game I combined those clone and minotaur powers with another one that returned dead units and filled the entire map with mythical murderbeasts over the course of five turns. It was wild and hilarious but obviously I lost the game as they razed all of existence to the ground. And that's the problem... to win, you have to work as hard as you can NOT to let things get that wild. Your score targets require you to foment conflict but not TOO much conflict, lest one side get out of control and destroy the other. To succeed you have to hold back as much as possible, only expanding your forces enough to handle bandits and maintain the balance, and that's disappointing in light of all the ridiculous chaos you could be sowing. Add to that the fact that most of your time is spend building towns and managing resource quotas, and the game can start to drag once you're taking long turns to plan out new settlements or calculate how to distribute blessings to make a pitched battle a draw. That brings me to my one big knock against Skyward Collapse, that games are just too long for what they are. The standard game length is over a hundred turns, where each one could take five minutes or more to plot out necessary developments. I don't mind the challenge of balancing conflict, in fact that's what sucked me in, but it gets tiresome after three hours in the same game. On the bright side, there are a boatload of options in customizing your games and shorter eras is definitely an option everyone should explore there. In the end, Skyward Collapse turned out to be a great idea that works well, just not perfectly. Its flaws are big enough that they should give people pause, but specific enough that they won't spoil the game for everyone. It's also a really nice-looking game, with some excellent landscape and building art and decent enough units that make it one of Arcen's most attractive titles to me. The soundtrack is oddly jazzy and relaxing which works better with the theme than I expected, and surely made it easier to while away hours building cities to be razed. Skyward Collapse isn't for everyone, but if you think it might be then it's definitely worth a shot.
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Jul 30, 2017 05:48
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So hey, the Weeklong Deals are actually real good this week, probably the best concentration of good stuff I've seen in awhile. And the Anno series is on sale until Wednesday, still some of my all-time favorite builder games. If you'd like to peruse my roundup, it's right here.
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Aug 1, 2017 05:48
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The remasters also crash like hell for some people. I can't seem to get past Medical in the first one because of that.
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Aug 2, 2017 22:50
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Hollow Knight is on sale again and just got the first of three (!) free content updates which added new bosses, a new fast travel system, and other surprises. I really, really think you should get it.
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Aug 3, 2017 18:19
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Det_no posted:Do you know if they are are post game bosses? Or if the game is structured in a way that it doesn't really matter at what point you face them? I don't think there's really any post-boss stuff in Hollow Knight, it's loaded with optional areas and bosses and powers you can do whenever you manage to find them. I'd assume this content is the same, since they have to be designing it for people who've beaten the game AND people picking it up right now. You'd probably be pretty safe getting the game now and just popping back in to see new stuff when it's added (that's what I'm doing since I've had it for awhile), but waiting for the rest of it or deeper discounts wouldn't be a bad idea either. As long as everyone plays it eventually, I'm satisfied. 
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Aug 3, 2017 19:07
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Azran posted:Ironically, I think my gf is going to go with The Sims 2. What are the best "build a town/city" games on Steam? You might have seen this already but I wrote about a whole bunch of builder (and management and trading) games last year. You can find them all here. Blattdorf posted:Doesn't help. I think the issue is with how the game loads data. I've increased the heap allocation size to max and this reduced the frequency, but it still happens. I would get stuttering in Hollow Knight sometimes if I loaded up and played another game before playing it, but restarting my PC and loading Hollow Knight immediately made it run perfectly. Not sure if that'll help you at all but that made it a complete non-issue for me.
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Aug 4, 2017 16:09
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SinineSiil posted:Okei I looked at the store page for this and it has a gif of you fighting a building-sized skull and that looks pretty neat. It also sounds roguelikey and I need more of those for this December.
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Aug 4, 2017 18:28
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Waffle! posted:Nongunz is a capable platformer, shooty-grindy rogue-like that takes the player hatred of that genre to a new level of pettiness. The game doesn't tell you anything, there's no words on the menu at all, and your player stats screen looks like this: Hardly seems that complicated. I mean, you've got Accuracy, Bullet Speed, Bullet Pathfinding, Proofreading Duration, White Swords, Red Swords, Mosaic Mastery, Bullet Leadership, Herbal Levitation Power, Floor Explosion Rate, Cholesterol, Red Sword Chance (out of White Swords, I assume), Backwards Stumbling Proficiency, Subtle Smirk Rating, Progress Towards Knot-Tying Badge, and Move Speed. I haven't been this excited about a stat sheet since Dredmor!
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Aug 4, 2017 19:45
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nelson posted:Hero of the Kingdom 59 cents (90% off). If you want a pretty chill point and click adventure game that costs less than a can of soda this is one to buy. So far, it is pretty fun based on my one hour of playing it last night. It's probably my favorite chill game ever, it's just so relaxing to click around and earn stuff to build bridges and raid camps and then go fishing and collect mushrooms.
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Aug 4, 2017 21:04
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Rookersh posted:hi goons, are you fans of cool and good games. It's Disney Interactive doing this, and it's a super cool thing to do for some of the best classic FPSes around. Looks like they put out a compatibility patch for Star Wars Rebellion too so I guess they're going to be supporting the whole franchise going forward. Might actually get me to pick them up on Steam at last.
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Aug 5, 2017 00:17
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IronicDongz posted:also what's wrong with giving a negative review while also having a significant amount of time in the game? Wouldn't someone with more time know best about the quality? You're kind of touching on the problem there, once you end up in "sunk cost mode" you're no longer able to rationally evaluate the game unless you're somehow self-aware and honest enough to understand how that colors your impressions. A lot of the bullshit that fuels bullshit reviews springs from personal investment in the game that makes objective criticism impossible, and the longer someone plays a game the more likely they're going to form those personal investments. That's how you get people with two thousand hours in a game hating it because the developers reskinned their favorite hat, or loving it despite the developers re-tuning it to be virtually unbeatable. Like, I get this and I'm aware of the facets and I still would never expect anyone to take me seriously if I tried to review Marvel Heroes, a game I spent 600+ hours in. I don't trust my friend with 1000+ hours in Skyrim to evaluate it fairly. I'm not saying it's impossible for us to do it, I'm saying it becomes exponentially harder to do the further you get out from whatever the average playtime is.
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Aug 6, 2017 00:03
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I love Gungeon so much. You can count me in the crowd whose last great Total War was Rome 1, too. I put an unhealthy amount of time into the original Shogun despite its flaws, but Medieval never grabbed me the same way. Rome sure as hell did, especially once I realized how much neat corner-case stuff you could do. When it came time for me to finally claim Rome, I didn't want to deal with the huge army it had levied. I had a spy who had contracted the plague, so I stationed him in the city until he gave it to the residents and then waited for the reaper to claim his dues. What remained of the army barely offered any resistance. After that I didn't bother to look into Medieval 2, and then when Empire got such terrible reviews at launch I kinda left the series behind. I've always wanted to try Shogun 2 but it's so far out from the original I wonder if I would even like it as much.
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Aug 7, 2017 01:28
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Raged posted:Stupid question, but I am writing up my weekly pub trivia and was trying to figure out the total number of games available of steam. I went to https://steamspy.com/ and looked at the steam stats section. It there really over 2 million games on steam or am I looking at the wrong info? I have no idea what you're looking at but filtering the store search to just games returns 16,678 entries which I believe is an accurate count.
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Aug 7, 2017 08:37
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:You might like Momodora (which is similar to HK in a lot of ways), but it's ultra super short so I didn't find it real satisfying personally. It's on sale in the current Weeklongs, fyi. It might also be one of the few things of note, the Weeklong Deals look pretty awful from here and I'm the one trying to find good in them. If you want to read about the crap being offered I have a bit to say about them here.
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Aug 7, 2017 20:47
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Infinity Gaia posted:I've got no loving idea what I'm doing in Nongunz and the controls feel kinda awkward. I wish there was a way to shoot with the mouse without the screen spazzing out, shooting with the keyboard is just not comfortable at all. Haven't even managed to beat the first boss yet, and there's often areas that just feel weird to go through. I feel like I'm missing some controls or something because sometimes it just feels impossible to avoid getting hit by stuff. You really, really, really want a controller for this one, the dodge roll and slide are very important and you can cancel both into midair jumps that can let you reach seemingly inaccessible areas. I wouldn't say it's impossible to avoid getting hit by some stuff but some of the room-enemy arrangements make it real hard not to take damage. Fortunately your health regenerates and you can consume your upgrades for health before they expire. You absolutely can sit around and farm points, in fact in the room you go to when you quit you can make time run faster to passively accumulate more points. The thing is, you're not going to get nearly as many points passively as you are from chaining combos together, which can get you in excess of 10k a pop once you get around 20-30x. And since your upgrades expire over time, it's more important to be gathering points and upgrades quickly than to build huge reserves. I'm enjoying figuring the whole thing out and the combat is pretty fun, but from what I can tell you're basically doing dry runs until you assemble the upgrades and weapons you need for a perfect full run and that's not super compelling to me. Since you lose everything except the stuff you've banked at the graveyard when you die, you have to be 100% sure you're going to kill a boss when you face them or you stand to lose a ton of progress.
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Aug 7, 2017 23:48
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I understand that +/- (and the resulting % positive score) is better, but if there was also a "wait for a sale" recommendation addendum, that would make writing reviews/giving games recommendations so much easier. Oddworld remake at $8 is a great deal. At $20 it feels like a ripoff. It's funny you mention that because the curator system has a neutral/informative rating in addition to positive or negative, but because the two systems are entirely divested from each other you can't write an actual neutral review for your neutral curation to point to. Personally though I prefer the binary up/down system, because in the end the point should be to tell people to get it or not even if you have to qualify the hell out of your position. While I'm here, anyone play Bunker Punks? How complete is it? EDIT: Huh, saw something called Hermodr in the related section. Anyone ever even heard of it? I might have a thing for retro FPSes. Too Shy Guy fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 04:15
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Blattdorf posted:I've gotten quite a ways into the game, so here's some general observations about the mechanics. Spoilered because you might want to discover things for yourself: This is real helpful, especially the combo details. The boss stuff never occurred to me, so I guess it would pay to get good at killing them. As far as heads go, have you found any more useful than the turret head? It does so much damage and it can hit things you can't.
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Aug 8, 2017 16:51
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Wildtortilla posted:Dungeonmans is showing as full price here. It was on sale over the weekend, maybe the sale price was lingering? That sucks about the sale ending v I think Zetsubo-san's recommendations were pulling from last week's list... I know I featured Shattered Planet last week but that deal ended Monday morning. PantsBandit posted:Apparently cards from that crappy batman tf2 clone sell for twice as much as your average trading card. Any idea why? The only way to get cards from F2P games on Steam is to spend actual money through the Steam version of it. You only get one card per $9 you spend, too, so they're much rarer than average.
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Aug 8, 2017 21:16
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flesh dance posted:Question about this part (i.e. what was I doing wrong)-- I played a bit last night and filled in an entire weapon, at least I'm 99% sure it was completely full, I kept adding extra points and it didn't appear to fill in any further, but I couldn't figure out what I had to do to get it off the wall, wtf? If you're on a controller, holding A fills it up, and hitting Y makes it appear. You can keep pumping points in to raise the weapon's level.
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Aug 8, 2017 22:30
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Gearbox has seen the future and correctly predicted that deckbuilding games are the hot new sector of the market they will get viciously owned in.
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Aug 9, 2017 03:16
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StrixNebulosa posted:....Who asked for this? Every publisher on Earth the moment Hearthstone started raking in money.
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Aug 9, 2017 04:17
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Fawf posted:
Jesus Christ it has VR support, that must be like playing through the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Aug 9, 2017 16:22
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REZ INFINITE IS A THING YOU CAN BUY RIGHT NOW
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Wildtortilla posted:I just looked at West of Loathing and Steams telling me it's similar to the game I've played: Borderlands 2. Uuuuuuuuuuh? Steam told me I should buy the DLC for Darkest Dungeon because I played a bunch of Sproggiwood. It's less an algorithm and more an agent of chaos.
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Aug 10, 2017 21:08
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I swear I've gotten every permutation of dumb complaint you can get on reviews EXCEPT people associating me with SA, not even when I took a hatchet to Starbound. No idea what I'm doing wrong, I'm in the goon group and everything.
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Aug 11, 2017 03:03
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ZearothK posted:Yeah, Knock-Knock had a fantastic sense of place, but the victory condition was a bit too esoteric even by Icepick Lodge's standards. The Void was restored to Steam last year. And you can count me among the folks who liked Knock Knock for its atmosphere and never figured out how the gently caress any of it worked. It's a long, repetitive game that you can render unwinnable so it's... actually a lot like their other games but worse in regards to obfuscation and repetition.
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Aug 12, 2017 15:51
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iRend posted:no I honestly just want some people to play golf with nobody plays golf come on If you were playing Golf With Your Friends I would golf with you. Friend.
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Aug 13, 2017 05:43
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MisterBibs posted:It's frustrating because I'd rather play peaceful-business kinda of game at the moment, but every one is either a combat game underneath, or it's as clear as mud. Maybe I'll try Offworld Trading Company... One option is the Port Royale or Patrician games, pure trading sims set in the Caribbean or Hanseatic, respectively. You can run afoul of pirates if you don't form convoys for defense but I think that's an option you can straight turn off when starting a new game. There's also Big Pharma if you'd rather puzzle out drug compositions and assembly lines than supply lines.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:39
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I don't wanna put Strix on the spot but she posted a pretty cool story about her NMS exploits today on Twitter that got me interested in giving it a try. I mean, I've always been interested in NMS because I love wandering aimlessly in games but I think that pushed me fully into Get It Eventually mode. So yeah, how about those Weeklong Deals, huh? There's actually poo poo in there you folks enjoy, like Wuppo and Hexcells so you might want to have a look for yourselves. And if not, I can cover the stuff I've played. And buy Mini Metro while you're at it, I loooooooove Mini Metro. EDIT: Whoops, there you are 
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Aug 14, 2017 20:41
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Crabtree posted:As dumb as an image as it is to use, China is gonna do as it does regarding that symbol: utilize its older symbolism that they think of it with regardless of how that doesn't really matter or translate well to the rest of the world. I'm pretty sure a culture that's used a particular symbol for thousands of years doesn't have to give it up because a gaggle of assholes in the 20th century co-opted it. Christians didn't give up on the cross when the KKK started burning them in peoples' yards. It's a map symbol that means temple, and it's used throughout Asia. Westerners do a double-take the first time they see it and then forget about it when the look at the map legend or just wiki it. No one actually mistakes it for crypto-nazis.
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Aug 14, 2017 22:34
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Zaphiel posted:I've written a review for a game I'm really passionate about, but it's turned out a bit long. Do people prefer longer or shorter reviews? Should I go into detail about the battle system, or keep it lighter? If your goal is to sell other people on the game, go into the details of how it plays and why those details are good things. Explaining the battle system will help a lot because people will read reviews to find out the mechanics work if the store page isn't super clear on them. Folks who actually read reviews don't care how long they are, so make it as long as you need to explain why it's good.
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Aug 15, 2017 19:34
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sebmojo posted:Dear Esther can be great if you're in the mood. Wait for a rainy day, pour yourself a whiskey and start it, not looking for or expecting anything in particular. It's been years since I played Dear Esther and I remember liking the experience, especially the visuals, but I don't recall enough of the story to say if it was actually any good. I just took on Gone Home for my weekly review (it's four years old as of yesterday) and all this talk of walking sims makes me want to give Esther another go. I wonder if I need an actual "Walking Sim" tag for these reviews, I've just been using "First-person" and "Adventure" together thus far.
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Aug 16, 2017 18:14
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Synthbuttrange posted:Nidhogg 2 has an interesting art style. I think it would be neat if it became a long-running series with a completely different style every time. Like Nidhogg 3 does the super-slick N++ look, Nidhogg 4 does a Hollow Knight hand-drawn look, Nidhogg 5 goes for Yoshi's Island crayon, and so on.
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Aug 17, 2017 04:19
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corn in the bible posted:Steam Level actually affects how many friends you can have on Steam for some inane reason I think that was their intended pain point for getting people to buy in even if they didn't care about badges.
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Aug 17, 2017 19:51
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Palpek posted:Guess what, a new Anno set during the industrial age is coming, it looks great: I'm so stoked for this and the Black Mirror remake.
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Aug 22, 2017 15:59
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Palpek posted:I guess I enjoyed Alien: Isolation. That was a whole thread ago, you're practically a different person now
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Aug 23, 2017 00:48
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AngelesXO posted:Any opinions on Dreadout? Depressingly awful. It's got a fantastic setup and some really cool-looking ghosts, but the areas are huge and empty and those cool-looking ghosts are huge pains in the rear end to fight. I haven't tried Keepers of the Dark but I've heard it's actually pretty good, particularly because it goes for a boss rush approach to the formula which cuts down on the huge sprawling maps and makes the ghosts more interesting to deal with.
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Aug 23, 2017 17:04
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