Rimworld would be my top suggestion, as others have noted.
I picked up Old World (excellent native Linux support BTW) during this summer sale and have not been able to put it down. If you’re a fan of Civilization style strategy games I’d highly recommend checking it out. I haven’t really enjoyed a Civ game since Civ 4, and Old World feels very similar but fresher and with less jank. it’s got a Crusader Kings style dynasty system with randomized events that adds a layer of role playing your leader and securing their dynasty through heirs you can train/influence.
As for the repeatability, Old World has tons. Each culture plays significantly differently, and each leader has different bonuses that encourage an interesting style of play. Games don’t play the same because of the mentioned event system, but also because learning new technologies is “randomized” as well. New techs are researched based off a selection of 4 drawn tech cards once you finish a previous technology. The card system makes it so you can’t just rush straight to archers and dominate the early game to snowball into a power house every game, but its not truly random so you can “game” the system in your favor to get the techs you want with the tools the game gives you through either unique leader powers, or specific governor roles for example.
The game is super deep while not being off puttingly complex.
I almost exclusively play single player games and honestly Elden Ring has been a huge time sink. There’s just something about mastering it that is satisfying. It has online features but they’re not required.
Combat also varies heavily between weapon types and equipment weight. You have to approach combat completely differently with different gear, so you can play it again with less of a feel of exploration (probably not none; it’s huge), but completely different battles.
Ah yes it is rather poorly optimized. Before it I was playing Against the Storm which doesn’t have such high requirements.
Also Mount and Blade provides some amazing single player experiences that are hard to find elsewhere. Get into a battle with hundreds of units, command a cavalry charge in first person while you personally lead a flank from the other side.
Not really a review channel, but Josh from Let’s Game It Out is my favorite. He loves to break games, whether they are polished or janky. One of the few YT creators that I actually allow subscription notices.
He’s excellent, but I’ll stress the “not a review” part. He’s hilarious but you usually won’t get a good look at the games from watching his videos. He’ll often take a single mechanic and spend the entire video breaking the game in half using it, which means he won’t show 90% of the game’s content or how it normally plays.
My recommendation l is going back to the basics: chess, especially lichess.org
You can choose a mode however you want, and it may or may not be stressful. Multiplayer with friends or random online people, choose a time between 30 seconds for a game and infinity to move.
If you don’t want to play right now, you can solve tactical exercises.
The stick is better for movement, while the pads are better for aiming. And the buttons work fine where they are.
Arguably the left side pad is a bit useless for gaming itself, but its nice to have two pads for desktop navigation and using the on screen keyboard that is build into steam.
Careful now, the swarm of all 11 people who use the left touchpad for movement might hear you and eat you alive while they chant, “just try setting movement to the left touchpad. You’ll never go back… You’ll never go back …”
I’ve tried it a number of times and just can’t get it to work for me. Far too much travel distance for me, and the lack of tactile feedback makes it difficult. In some ways, I like the floatiness feeling that that the travel distance creates, but ultimately it wasn’t worth the precision adjustments.
I tried it for some 2D side scrollers, FPS, and 3rd person games. I liked it most for 3rd person but couldn’t get a hang of the other two.
Plus, I really like using the left touch pad as a floating menu, which the joystick can’t do haha.
Oh, I forgot to say – the Steam Decks smaller track pad is actually nice for this reason because the shorter travel distance solves the floatiness issue for me in a lot of cases. I actually play Revita 50/50 between touchpad and joystick, just based on how I’m feeling.
A lot of it is going to be game-specific, and spending time tweaking the control settings until you find what feels responsive to you.
The rest of it is going to be technique, and a lot of trial and error to find out what works best for your play style. For instance, I can't do fast-paced, twitchy movements on a controller (even things that are technically possible to do on a controller; I just don't have the dexterity anymore), so I have to adopt a different play style when using a controller. I usually will go for a more support-based role, if possible; opting for long-range weapons/abilities, and playing a more patient, campy game. I play slower and more methodically this way, and try to position myself so that I don't ever get into the situations where I need to react to somebody closing the gap on me in the first place.
For me, it's an entire mindset shift. If I play the same game on M/K, I'll be playing with a much faster, reaction-centric style instead of one where my movements are more premeditated.
Some other tips will be learning to do things like using your left stick for fine-tuning your aim (you can get very precise horizontal micro-adjustments by leveraging your player's position, which can be useful for getting your shot off before the other guy does), experimenting with gyro controls if that's an option for you, or trying joystick extenders (small gadgets that clip onto your sticks to extend their effective length, which may make aiming easier).
As far as what to practice in, I don't know of any aim trainers that are designed for controller, so I'd say you should just practice with a game that you either don't care about or where it doesn't matter if you lose a bunch. I'd recommend The Finals; it's free to play, the default quickplay mode is active and puts you into a match quickly, and it's super low-stakes so you don't have to feel bad about experimenting during a live match. Your teammates don't have loot drops or anything hinging on your success, so if you play badly, nobody cares. And it's got pretty robust customization options for the controller settings (dead zones, acceleration curves, etc), which can help you figure out what settings you respond best to and what to look out for in the settings of other games. It has a huge variety in movement/weapon options, so you'll end up developing skills/habits that will transfer over to other games quite easily.
I didn't mean to weirdly steer this into becoming an ad for The Finals. But it's a very controller-friendly FPS that I think will be beneficial to practice with. I think it's also pretty fun, but that's subjective.
it is ridiculous how much content that game offers for the low price tag. one of my most played right now. the only td I have found that well maintained and very replayable
It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety… It looks like I’ve played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven’t even touched yet.
The greatest tower defense game ever made, really. It’s seriously impressive how it appeals to very casual users and the most extreme fans that want a challenge. I also really respect that, while the game has some mictrotransactions, you can’t use any of them on the hardest difficulty.
Dark Souls 1 and 2 had notoriously horrible PC ports, and Elden Ring was one of the only games that Valve stepped in to fix themselves through Proton due to its horrible stuttering. Regardless of their intentions, their familiarity with PC hardware is still definitely a “work in progress”.
Because elden ring lags and struggles to keep fps at 60 sometimes with a 3080, why even try to go higher. I’d also saybthay playing ultra wide gives a vision advantage and PvP and invaders being a thing I’d prefer not.
Flawless widescreen has an fps uncap option as well as letting the game fully support ultra wide. (The game is fucking stupid and renders in ultra wide anyway and then just puts black bars to force 16:9) You of course have to play without online features because you can’t use anti cheat at the same time.
It doesn’t fuck with the mechanics or anything does it? I tried unlocking Katamari Damacy when I got it on Steam and it worked but also became unplayable 😮💨
So far I haven’t noticed any mechanics changing, but I might be missing something? It miiiiight mess up stuff like parry timing, but I don’t think it does.
This kind of infuriates me. On rare occasions loading into the game (unmodified) it’ll glitch out and forget to render the borders for a good 5 minutes or until first teleport. Like come on! I can see it! I know you’re doing it!
Another game, Code Vein (shut up, I love it, just embrace some trash from time to time) did the same thing. I could tell because the layering was messed up and your partner’s nameplate would render over the black borders by mistake …
I bought a Steam account back in 2007-ish. I wanted to play HL2 but didn’t want to create a Steam account. I thought then, and still think now, that I shouldn’t need to create an online account just to play an offline game.
The guy gave me his login information, and then I went in to change the email and all other info to generic info. I’ve been using that account for 17 years, but I did eventually have to give them real info to buy new games.
The controller sucked. It sucked then; it sucks now. But it had ports for four of them, so that console had tons of four-player multiplayer games, and they were great. PS1 could technically support it, but no one had a multitap, and because no one had a multitap, practically no games supported more than two players.
Cartridges were expensive and couldn’t hold much data on them, but you basically never saw any loading times. Long load times were a thing I associated with the PlayStation brand up until the PS5. Loading times were definitely an expensive trade-off for that console, and it didn’t help them in the market, but it certainly made the N64 stick out for it.
bin.pol.social
Ważne