It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.
I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.
But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.
I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.
Edit: Oh, also it’s tangentially related to his Jacques McKeown book series, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, and Will Leave the Galaxy for Good.
Stranglehold. I friggin love this game. It’s the John Woo videogame that is technically a sequel to the movie Hard Boiled and has Chow Yun-fat as the lead. I don’t know but I just really dig this game. Similar to it Enter the Matrix I also love. I go back and replay both every so often.
It’s also a bit of a comfort type of thing as those came out in the early 00’s when I was in my early 20s and still living at home and had more money than I knew what to do with hah.
I guess it depends on why you think it’s bad, so for me it’s Wuthering Waves. I absolutely love that game, but it’s “bad” because it’s a gacha game and that monetization scheme is absolutely fucking disgusting.
The game itself is actually really good and the story/side stories had me cry like 4 times already lol
On the gacha front, I play Zenless Zone Zero. Parry mechanics are nothing new, but I love both the way they have you parry by swapping in an agent to take the blow, and the very detailed effects and animations they have for each attack.
It’s still a gacha, and I remind myself to stop playing anytime it bores me; but it manages to hold my attention decently.
I play that as well as genshin… I have a problem lol
ZZZ got me to stop spending money though, they’re way too fucking greedy. I went full pity and lost every single 50/50 in that game and almost all of them were nekomata… Hoyo can go to hell lol
Yeah…a long time ago I learned lessons about patience, delayed satisfaction, and ended up building a large roster in that game without giving them a dime. I could afford their packs, but it seems like a bad price ratio especially when acknowledging the low chances.
For me it’s Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. It would be super easy to whale out and spend a bunch of money to get the characters and weapons I want, but I (almost 100%) limit myself to the basically fixed monthly costs.
I was surprised how super in on hoyo stuff I was until I started doing the dailies and the checklists on the regular. I kinda ruined my approach into Honkai because by the time I got into it, I learned from genshin I needed to do those dailies to get a decent shot at getting characters I actually cared about. And then I didn’t make any progress, and didn’t get in like I did for genshin
so we’re all clear. What is the difference between selling 100 copy’s at $5 vs selling 5 copies at $100?
Dev’s lock in prices at $100 and only discount down to 5%-10% because industry standards and publishers or some bullshit. They don’t care if I eat, I don’t care if the eat. Doesn’t matter how good the game is. This is how it’s always been in capitalism and to participate means neither of us care about the other one. If we maintained what these sales were like during the hayday, I’d go to bat for any of these devs. But I’ve seen the sales in the past few years. Minimal at best then posts like these saying “support them”. Eat shit.
You’re not a starving artist any more then we are. You want to create a world of maximized profits then don’t ask for sympathy and support when it takes away from my labor too. I will play the game like you and demand cheaper while you demand more money. Go figure games now are not great and maybe profits are up because prices don’t drop anymore, but there’s likely more starving artist types developing games now then there were during the great days because guess what got everyone into gaming then? Cheap sales and game prices we all could afford and play on our jank systems. Now they fuck us and say “support our full price game or you’re a piece of shit”
Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I’m just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.
I’ve tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I’ve been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I’m very quickly even more broke than I started.
Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That’s just shameful.
Play with keyboard and mouse - makes hitting things much easier. Redesign all mechs to have max armour. For most of the campaign bringing as many SRMs to the field as possible is good. Focus fire with your lance mates - makes them much more effective. Remove JJ - useless. LBX10s are great. Remove useless single LRM 5s and 10s from most things - put a lot of lrms on mechs with good quirks - Archer, Longbow. Keep moving, ideally always at least 45 degrees to your target
I only played up to MW3, back then the meta was maxing out on armor and medium range lasers. Go in close , aim for the opponent’s leg, shoot. Your mech powers down from the heat for a couple seconds, but the other mech is out of the action. Proceed to one-shot almost every opponent.
Can’t say I feel guilty about liking these but if we’re talking about mediocre games I love that would be:
Drakengard 3 - simple, repetitive gameplay, huge amount of asset reuse and terrible performance if you’re crazy enough to play it on PS3. It also has a really engaging and tragic story, full of weirdness unique to the series (well, the first game anyway, haven’t played D2 yet).
Kane & Lynch (both games) - they’re rough, gritty and don’t pull any punches. Pretty divisive in terms of gameplay though I personally think it’s thematically consistent and adds a lot to the atmosphere. My favourite games from IOI despite not being as well designed or polished as the Hitman series.
Oni - 2001 action game by Bungie. Really cool hand-to-hand combat system, huge empty levels, simple story with wannabe Ghost in the Shell elements.
Starbound - lots of hype about Terraria in space, lots of wasted potential and cool features that didn’t make to the final release. I tend to prefer beta versions (mainly “Glad Giraffe” beta) but the final one also seemed alright based on what little I played of it. Definitely not as good as it had chance to be during development.
Scarface: The World is Yours - budget GTA clone based on the 1983 movie with Al Pacino (it’s actually a sequel). It looks bad even for the time but it plays well enough and has some neat mechanics which made it stand out, if only a little.
Tresspasser - the infamous Jurassic Park game with full control of your arm and focus on physical interactions with the environment. It’s a bit clunky and far from polished but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless.
That’s all that comes to mind for now, I might update the post if I remember anything else.
Dude, I loved Kane and Lynch! I co-op both of them with a buddy of mine. The jank was real but added charm to it. People complained about the violence but that shit was great. Also might be bias because IO Interactive made Hitman and that’s one of my all time favorite series.
It was also an unfortunate victim of the time when IOI struggled with figuring out how to transition from “classic” way of making games to the modern, high budget approach. I’m glad they managed to get back into the rhythm with new Hitman games but it’s still a little disappointing K&L had to serve as a stepping stone towards better times.
Beta Starbound was the shit. Release was just shit, with no “the”. They took a great game of endless discovery and procedural generation with a gameplay loop that just worked out of beta and filled it with completely predictable set pieces and juvenile hard-coded nonsense. They literally added a poop emoji monster FFS.
The worst part is there’s no “full” version since each beta added new features and removed other ones. I’d give a lot for a build which combines all of the lost mechanics into a single package.
Wet. The reviews were pretty harsh due to the length and number of loading screens, but the gameplay was extremely fun. It does end with a cinematic and quick time events which was a bit disappointing, but it’s one of the few games I’ve played through multiple times.
The update from CS:GO to CS2 made the game unplayable on my aging hardware which is the only thing that got me to stop playing.
I’m in a single-player game phase now, and I have to say it’s nice having gaming sessions where I don’t get called every slur imaginable. That being said, Counter-Strike scratches a very specific gaming itch for me, I’ll definitely come crawling back one day.
Oof… sorry. I haven’t played it in so long that I think I was playing CS:GO. It does have a certain appeal.
I also live in a third world country so most games ping is very high. But CS is popular enough that there must be local servers. Because my ping is super low in CS. Another good reason I play it.
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