It’s the same in the sense of just knowing the information the game has I suppose but no it’s not the same as playing.
But it depends. Like if there’s a game I’m curious about but don’t think I’ll play then of course I’ll just watch someone else play it. If it’s a game I’m interested in and want to experience fresh on my own then no, unless I’ve played it already and the people playing it are amusing.
I played it at launch on PC, and the only thing I remember is terrible performance in certain areas. Don’t think I had any real gameplay bugs, but maybe I just forgot.
I still didn’t like the game, but bugs weren’t really the issue for me.
good lord, Antares and Vega are offensively bright once you adjust to the dark.
M4!! HOLY GUACAMOLE WOW! M4 by itself made being out tonight worth it!
M80: cool, felt cool to find it, but it looks like any of the other tighter globs and I didn't want to mess with switching to one of my narrow AFOV higher power eyepieces on my manual dob. May revisit once I invest in a higher power eyepiece with a decent AFOV.
Epsilon Lyrae: hmm, am I maybe just not using enough mag? looks like a regular double star to me.
Took the telescope for a slew through Sagittarius, for a laugh, was not disappointed. Breathtaking amount of stars there.
Was all aboard the strugglebus making sense of Hercules's constellation. Didn't help that he was at the zenith, which made using the dob weird when looking for M13 and made looking at the constellation annoying after staring straight up like a turkey for minutes.
Took some time to re-acquaint myself with Draco, Cygnus, and Aquila.
Didn't pick out any more DSOs, in part because I got annoyed with blowing out my night vision, even with the red light, on my charts.
I've been fairly serious about the hobby for about 9 months now, and it seems like I saw way more satellites out tonight than I did when I stopped back in May. Bruh, the little bastards were everywhere.
I think I’d like to give some more indie games a try. Maybe I’ll set a “New Year’s resolution” for this anniversary to try some more? I heard of one called Signalis that sounded intresting
We’ve been in an indie game boom for a while, so you should have a pretty huge variety of amazing titles to choose from. I’ve been mixing in indies with Patient Gaming of older AAA/big name titles and having a blast.
Do you have any suggestions? I’m embarrassed to admit it, and it definitely shows my age range but the last Indie game I really remember playing was Five Nights At Freddy’s and Doki Doki Literature Club. So I have a lot to catch up on
Just yesterday I played through GRIS, which was an absolutely amazing experience (though short). An interactive artwork of a journey through grief. Definitely recommend it as a short in-between game. The same developers released Neva last year, which was also very well reviewed.
Before that I played Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree, which is a Soulslike Metroidvania with a PoE style skill tree. Really liked that one, the story was so-so but it has really good gameplay and super fun character customization. Good exploration, lots of secrets and i enjoyed the world as well. Looks pretty, too.
Blue Prince from earlier this year is a phenomenal game if you like escape room type puzzles. It’s an incredibly clever idea - a puzzle roguelite - and I had a great time with it. Gorgeous OST too. Definitely worth checking out, though be warned - taking hundreds of screenshots and 60+ pages of physical notes is almost required.
Earlier this year I played Skald: Against the Black Priory and I have a great amount of fondness for that game. A faux-retro RPG that pays tribute to late 80s style CRPGs it hit just right with me and ended up being my favourite RPG in a while. It’s fairly limited in scope, instead focusing on doing a few things well, and I think it really works out well for it. Beautiful music, great pixel art, great story. Also has some nice CRT emulation filters in the settings!
Which speaking of, right now I’m playing Blasphemous, which is another title with CRT emulation filters. It’s basically 2D Dark Souls but with more platforming. I have mixed feelings about the gameplay (I hate platformers) but the world building, story and lore are all immaculate and super cool.
Lastly, even though it’s in that not-quite-indie AA space you should play Claire Obscur: Expedition 33. Yes, it is actually that good, and much like when Elden Ring or BG3 released it’s kind of “required reading” to understand the zeitgeist.
But all of this is just my recent experiences off the top of my head, the list really does go on and on and on.
I’ve really been interest in trying Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 lately. I’ve been holding off on reading anything about it to avoid spoilers though. I might look into Skald: Against the Black Priory. I’m very picky about my RPGs but generally story heavy ones i enjoy
That’s the best thing to do with Clair Obscur. Don’t even watch a trailer, just play it. I bought it full price, but liked it so much I subsequently upgraded to the Deluxe Edition just because I wanted to support the devs.
Skald was a really great, concise experience that really worked for me. If you like a bit of Cthulu-esque cosmic horror you’ll enjoy the world building I think. I finished it in about 20h I think, and it was very nicely paced. No filler or grinding, just a flowing story. Definitely an indie positive surprise hit.
There are tons more indie darlings though depending on what genre you’re looking for. Tactical Breach Wizards, Vampire Survivors and Balatro are just a couple that are all very different from the ones I already listed.
I tried the demo and couldn’t really get into Hades unfortunately. Though it probably had my lack of interest in Greek Mythology working against it. Maybe i’ll try picking it up again though, that was years ago and i’ve found my tastes have changed
It was one of those things where I can tell there was a lot of love and care put into it, but I just personally couldn’t get into it. I have a copy of the Soundtrack from a friend though that they didn’t want for some reason so I can admit it’s really good
I never finished Signalis myself but it’s a pretty interesting game. One that I always suggest but never see much anywhere is a game I got on Humble a few years back called MO: Astray. Seems really simple initially but has a really interesting way of narrating the story that I don’t want to go further into.
MO: Astray sounds familiar. I wonder if I picked up a Bundle with it in it too. I’ll have to look into it though because 90% of my Humble library is unplayed
Yeah that’s pretty much the vibe for Zomboid, the opening text crawl literally says “This is how you died.” It’s not a matter of whether you make it or not, just how long you last and what happens before they inevitably get you lol.
Also if you die from a zombie bite, you can respawn as a new person and track down the zombie of your previous character to loot your stuff back which is fun.
Basically, me and my friend work together though so generally he dies when I die. I’m always the main Defense and Engineering guy and he’s like the group Farmer
That’s basically what it was like, except with a generic suburban dad lol. We did it with 4 whole floors and somehow only ran out of Shotgun shells on the last floor
We’ll probably be scavenging Metal Sheets and Planks all day the next time we play. It’ll be worth it though for the most egregious base for 2 people ever
I had an experience with Zomboid a while ago that I’ve never had with any other game. I’d had my character going for a while, had my base set up, all was going good and I was looting random houses. I came up to this one house that was completely ordinary but something in the back of my brain just went NOPE. There were no signs of anything sketchy from the outside but some sort of survival switch went off in my brain and was like “if you go in there you’re fucked” and I just walked away and left it.
Of course I’ll never know now if that was accurate or not, but I’ve never had that weird instinct go off from a game before lol.
Zomboid is very much like that. You can kind of develop a 6th sense as too what buildings are dangerous with how the game loves to fuck the player over (in a good way). It’s a fun experience all around though
The reason might be a slippery slope or whatever, but there’s mountains of disgusting visual novel incest fantasy shit, so much that I had to filter out all sexual content from Steam even though I might enjoy occasional Sex With the Devil or some Genital Jousting.
Thanks! I do this as a hobby and would probably get burnt out if I had to do this for work. I attempted to make daily posts for a while as a personal writing challenge and I got to #50 before I had to take a break.
But my posting would definitely be more consistent if someone paid me to do it. 😆 I need to go back and redo the first handful of posts I’ve made here, since I started out just posting a single screenshot. It’d be nice to actually discuss those games in depth too.
The key defining characteristic of a game is interactivity: the ability to affect the outcome in some way. Some games allow for less freedom than others in that respect, but watching someone else play and make those decisions for you is always going to be fundamentally different to playing it yourself.
Not to diminish the value of streams, especially if you find enjoyment in watching them, but you should understand that it’s not a comparable experience.
Like watching playthroughs of Gow Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2. I don’t have a PlayStation so I couldn’t play them when they first released (they’re on PC now, but expensive), but I was on the hype train so I wanted to see what happened.
Now that I know what happens, I still want to play through them myself so I can make the decisions, like you say.
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