Rollercoaster Tycoon. Super chill game, you just manage amusement parks and build rollercoasters. Openrct2 is an updated engine for it, which supports modern high resolution screens, but requires a copy of the game for the art assets.
SkillUp’s “This week in video games” videos are great both for news about the industry, and what’s coming up and worth keeping an eye out for. Listening to podcasts is another good one. I listen to MinnMax every week in particular.
Aliexpress is definitely the way to go. Here’s a link to spreadsheet with the best prices from legit stores: Link
(Compiled by /u/DargillaUomo over on reddit - i think he earns an affiliate cut, but they do seem to genuinely be the best prices if you’re buying new)
Other people have mentioned Paradox several times, and they are unquestionably the big name of the grand strat genre. Their main games are:
Hearts of Iron. WW2 setting, pretty much exclusively about war. If you want to flex your strategic skills, this is the one to get.
Victoria. The 100 years before WW2. Primarily about industrialisation. Victoria games have by far the most in-depth economy systems.
Europa Universalis. These ones are about the era of European colonialism, spanning three to four hundred years with the Napoleonic wars at the end. EU4 is pretty the most like a Total War campaign map in feel.
Crusader Kings. 700 years of feudalism. The map in these ones is limited to Europe, the western half of Asia, and the north of Africa. Distinct in that you play as a dynasty rather than a country. These ones are the most roleplay-heavy
Stellaris. This is the only one I haven't played, so I'm afraid I can't say much about it
They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.
As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.
Back in the early 90s, here in the UK, a company called Cheetah produced licensed joysticks based on Batman, Terminator, Alien³ and The Simpsons. They looked great but they were terrible to use, especially the Alien³ model which I really liked but was incredibly uncomfortable. I never bought one, just tried then on the shops, awful things.
There were some cheap ass weird ones in North America too. I remember for Christmas we’d ask for a Joycon or something like that, and we’d get “the Joycron,” which looked nothing like a controller, had a weird shape, felt like shit and was cheap as hell. The old man would be like, arrrr we saw it at the BiWay and it was 99 cents, why do you need the one thats $60? Then he would play it, and sure enough, by February you had the real one.
There’s a mod that puts a museum in solitude and hundreds of unique collectables into the game as well as several small quests. The whole of it is comparable to the Thieves guild in content and the stories are well written. Plus it gives you a place to store all the beautiful unique items and radiant quests to go get them.
Personally I love it, it’s everything I want in Skyrim.
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