So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.
Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).
For finding games on Steam, I’ve had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I’ll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it’s led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I’ll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.
Sometimes I’ve had luck with looking at “similar games” to a game, which are shown on that game’s store page.
But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.
I basically do the same, searching overwhelmingly positive games. But most I haven’t tried are poorly looking indie games or weird Asian games. I played several really good indie games, I’m not against that, but what I see generally doesn’t catch my interest. And I have over 600 games in Steam alone, so many good ones I already played.
Now it’s just a sea of junk, having to find a needle in a haystack. And user reviews aren’t a gold standard anymore. I’ve seen amazing reviews of mediocre games, as young people don’t have standards anymore as most games these days are empty of story, full of bugs or both.
The game dev community was outraged by bg3, warning people they shouldn’t see bg3 as a new standard. While back in the days when you still bought physical games in a store, it indeed was a standard to sell you a proper product for the price you pay.
These days I illegally download triple A games to check them first, if they are good I’ll buy them. I haven’t bought a triple A game for a long time. Often 2h of playtime for a refund on steam isn’t enough, when you want to see all the storyline videos and conversations. Not enough time to experience the gameplay.
Indie games I often buy immediately, they really put in effort to make something worth playing. Big companies however just put in effort to make it look really good to make a lot of pre-orders, then to abandon it after a few minor bug fixes while gameplay is poorly written and just a few hours. As long as you peek the interest for just over 2h so people aren’t eligible for a refund anymore. This is scamming people, I don’t understand why they keep getting away with it.
In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511500/Dominions_6__Rise_of_the_Pantokrator/ is a pretty involved fantasy strategy game. I haven’t played 6 much, but I’ve played the series a lot in the past, and each game is a pretty direct expansion of prior games. Not sure if that’s up your alley, though. The game turns can get pretty long late-game, as there’s a lot going on.
Going Medieval is a pretty great building/management type game! It gets updated often with new content too
You build your castle and manage the sims in their daily jobs. There’s a great building system, farming, defense against raiders, mining, a good crafting pipeline. It’s a lot of fun
Basebuilding/dungeon crawling/pixel art/roguelike. Kinda like ADOM meets stardew, but weirder and more Japanese. Weirder how? Here’s the wiki entry on the chaos shape race, which you can play as.
VERY in depth systems in the game. Mutations, crafting, prayer, it’s a deep game.
A classic one would be to go for BG1 and BG2
Then either play the enhanced editions with EET or play the originals with Baldur’s Gate Trilogy to allow you to play all three games as a singular campaign (as well as running BG1 in the same engine as BG2 if you go for the originals)
Switching to management then, have you played Banished?
Have you played the mod Colonial Charter? Latest version is 1.76 and I found a GDrive download here: www.gog.com/forum/banished/colonial_charter_mod
Mod makers site seems down.
Depends on what parts of banished caught you. The mod lets you build much more visually pleasing cities by adding lots of different housing styles and so on. It also add many more production chains. Was many years since I played it and I think it was an earlier version of it.
Just fyi, other companies like miyoo are thinking of stopping the US shipments as well. At least according to annon discord convos with support. But with the situation changing by the hour who knows.
I’d say it’s inevitable. With Anbernic (arguably the bigger name of them all) saying no more, I’d say they’ll all halt them sooner rather than later.
No problem for those of us in Europe or…anywhere else in the world, but I’m sad for those stuck in America (well, those who voted for a different leader anyway) who have to suffer.
I think that !space is the most general community, and communities like “!astronomy” and “!spaceflight” are subsets.
Interesting data from a telescope? Astronomy and space, but not spaceflight.
A new GPS satellite is launched? Spaceflight and space, but not astronomy.
The Perseverance rover drills into a neat rock on Mars? Space, but not really astronomy or spaceflight.
A new space telescope is launched? Definitely all three.
These are just my thoughts though, and I’d love to hear what others think.
@Bee, @otter, @Bitswap Thoughts on changing the display name of !space from “Space & Astronomy” to just “Space”? Not that astronomy posts wouldn’t be welcome, but it could help reduce confusion with this community.
It looks like the icon and banner are broken, even on mander.xyz. @Bitswap, were you in the process of updating those? It could be a cross instance moderation issue. Otherwise how are these:
I’m seeing reports in the forums that the GOG version of the game still has its LAN multiplayer. I only played a bit of Crysis multiplayer, but I can see why it would have been great. I was mostly on college networks at the time, so online multiplayer was rough for me unless it was peer to peer with someone else at my school, and hardly anyone had a computer that could run the game at the time; mine only got it running on low/medium settings.
I’ve been playing Under Night In-Birth II. I had bought it last year but never actually played it. After this first week of matches I’d say it’s my favorite in this latest “generation” of figthing games.
I randomly bought Azure Striker Gunvolt on Switch, since I rememberd hearing good things about it when it came out, but it’s not much fun to play. It feels really unpolished, the levels and bosses are a bit on the annoying side and the combat gimmick, where you need to tag enemies with projectiles to be able to damage them, feels really bad to use as it’s slow and unsatisfying.
Everyone playing Blue Prince reminded me of La-Mulana, which I’ve been playing in the last few days. I’m a bit conflicted on it, since I like most of what the game does except for the combat which I find rather bad and unfairly punishing when considering how imprecise it is. I am enjoying the game, although I’m a bit worried it might be too long.
The puzzle part feels like Outer Wilds, but without the log to help you and it’s also a bit less linear, which I’m personally enjoying but I can see why it could be boring.
The platforming/navigation is a bit janky but usable after a while.
The combat is IMO absolute garbage (the bosses in particular are pretty bad fights that waste your time and the hitboxes are terrible) and wouldn’t be surprised if this is what makes most people quit.
For now at least, the exploration and puzzles overshadow the negatives, but they are pretty big negatives that are hard to ignore.
I wanted to love La-Mulana a lot. And I do love it for building some of the foundation that some huge greats like Fez and Tunic and Outer Wilds stand upon. But holy shit, the game doesn’t want you to love it. The combat and movement are so punishing in an entirely unfun way. I stopped playing after getting what I understand to be like 70-80% of the way through the content the game has to offer and by the last ~20% of that I was dreading playing.
It is a game I have to thank for making way for the existence of some of my favourite games, but I hate it nonetheless.
I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus two years ago and liked it so much I wish I'd bought a more expensive model with analog sticks. I keep looking at all the shiny new stuff on the market and feeling the temptation to upgrade, but holding off because something better is always around the corner.
Well, guess I no longer have to worry about temptation now.
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