I play it in bursts every few months when I feel that space exploration itch. Usually there’s a new feature or two whenever I pick it up. So yeah, fan of the game and the company behind it.
i like nms but i wish each individual planet had more to do than just mining, scanning stuff, scavenging, and selling stuff. theres just no reason to do anything on any particular planet in your area unless you need resources it has and its a huge missed opportunity.
I think you might have misjudged when LCDs became common as by the end of 2004, when Halo 2 released, LCD TVs were already a reasonable fraction of new TV sales, and in parts of the world, it was only a few months later that LCD TVs became the majority. For PC monitors, the switch came earlier, so it was clear CRTs were on the way out while the game was being developed. If they hadn’t expected a significant number of players to use an LCD and tweaked the game as much as necessary to ensure that was fine, it would have been foolish
It’s entirely possible. I was just basing the guess it was designed with CRTs in mind because growing up, everyone my age still had a CRT until around 2008/2009, which we then replaced it with Plasma TVs. So it’s entirely possible my assumption is biased or skewed
Obviously, most people don’t replace their TV every year, so it was years after new sales were mostly LCDs that most people had LCDs, but companies making content like to be sure it looks good with the latest screens.
Space Station 14. The absolute best multiplayer experiences I’ve had since the heyday of Planetside 2 (not that the two games are even remotely similar, just thinking broadly about multiplayer enjoyment).
But it’s been a good year for other games too. Silent Hill 2 was excellent. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was excellent. Monster Hunter Wilds had some damn good looking monsters (but was not excellent).
Space Station 14 sounds interesting. What kind of multiplayer is it? I.e. is it one where the typical experience is to play with randoms via matchmaking, or is it a game best enjoyed with friends?
I have discord server full of nerds who I played games with during COVID (and its aftermath), and this might be a good excuse to see if I can reawaken that server for games
Kinda sorta like if Rimworld was set on a space station, but players control a single pawn, and servers are in the 50, 80, 150+ player count depending on server and time of day. The vibe is pretty similar to Among Us, just vastly, vastly more deep and complex than Among Us.
You join a server, create a character, pick a job ranging from janitor, bartender, musician, botanist, cargo, medical, security, research, and so on, then you join and try to keep the space station running smoothly by focusing on your job and working with other departments.
Or, you can, if you want, get a chance at being an antagonist with various goals ranging from stealing stuff to killing specific people, becoming a zombie and spreading the infection, or even blowing up the whole station with a nuke.
It’s incredibly deep, and it being a highly social game with some degree of roleplay focus, it’s crazy and fun and nothing else out there is quite like it, aside from space station 13 which came before it.
To answer your other questions - no matchmaking at all, you join a specific server and whatever job you end up with is determined by which jobs you have unlocked (by playtime in specific roles), which jobs you’ve set for yourself that you’d like to work, and which other players have also chosen those same jobs. Playing with friends can be challenging if servers are full.
And you absolutely must NOT communicate outside of the game unless the server specifically allows it. That includes Discord, that’s considered “metacomms”, so go in knowing you’ll have to use text chat for everything - it’s how everyone teaches and learns anyways, so it’ll come naturally
That sounds like a space version of Eco, with the roles stuff. In Eco, it’s impossible for one person to acquire all skills, so people on a server have to specialise.
I started out as a miner, to honour my late best friend who was a dwarf at heart and would definitely have been a miner if he’d been playing with us. Then I branched out into masonry to make use of the absurd amounts of stone I’d been mining. If I wanted something made of wood, I had to go flutter my eyelashes at my friend who had started out as a logger and branched into carpentry. I enjoyed having a domain that was my own, and a clear way to be useful to the server. Other players had some level of mining and masonry skill by the midgame, but for anything serious, they had to wait until I was online.
It sounds like Space Station 14 is far more hectic than this, but in an interesting way. I wonder if it will scratch the same itch that Eco did wrt being useful in a clear role
Honestly sounds and looks quite different at first glance, but if you enjoyed working a particular job and getting better at it over time, that’s for sure an itch that SS13/14 scratches well!
take botany for instance. can be as simple as planting seeds in hydroponic trays and harvesting fruit and veggies for the kitchen and for the chemistry department.
But one can go so much deeper than that - tired of onion plants only yielding two onions when harvested? well, cocoa trees drop six pods when harvesting, so you can rub a cotton swab on the cocoa tree and then rub it on the onion plant to deposit a random genetic trait from the cocoa tree, and if you’re lucky or if you repeat enough times the right way, you can end up with an onion plant that drops six each harvest! or, maybe just end up with onions that contain theobromine.
There’s also mutation of plants, which can add various traits (like offgassing tritium, or making the plant scream in pain when harvested, or making the produce so slippery that people slip and fall if they walk over it), and of course those traits can also get swabbed over to other plants.
there’s even an illegal “gatfruit” that produces a high powered revolver when eaten, tho those aren’t easy to come by
I should play more Space Station 14. I use to play quite a bit of 13, and it was quite fun to deep fry everything. I hope more things are added to 14! Otherwise I’ll just have to continue my escapades of “I only know how to make banana bread, botany boss, thanks!”
14 is in a really good state right now, I think! Wizden, being the upstream/vanilla can seem a little sparse compared to, say, the Starlight fork which adds a lot, or the dozens of other forks out there.
I’ve spent probably most of my time as botanist, with cargo/salvage a close second and musician a close third.
Definitely play more, especially if it’s been some time since you last tried it, the development of it is quite active and ongoing. Hell, wizden’s test server has been trying out a complete rework of the medical system, so they’re definitely not afraid to throw some huge changes out there and see how well the community responds to it.
When I played I was a chef! Often I just ghosted though in order to learn more. Follow people around, see what they do. Helped my autistic brain so I felt better about fucking shit up.
Loved my chef knife. Stupid mice eating my banana bread!
Spectating is fun! I haven’t done much of it but recently I followed a musician avali for their whole shift, and it ended up being really interesting. They found a spear and were told to get a permit for it, which they did, but then someone stole the permit and they got arrested for carrying a weapon without a permit despite being issued one, despite the sec officer being told about the theft, and the thief standing right in front of the sec officer at the time.
then they later got arrested for the same thing by the same officer.
they eventually tried to sue the security department, and the trial was about to start, but was interrupted by the jury room getting bombed, and when they tried to hold the trial in the hallways of course chaos broke out and they had to evac, and didn’t bother trying the trial at centcomm.
Ravenswatch came out at the end of last year, but it’s an incredibly satisfying multiplayer roguelike. Really scratches that asymmetrical gameplay itch.
Split Fiction is a master class in game design. It creates these awesome storytelling moments that could only be created in this exact way.
UFO 50: holy shit this one came out of nowhere for me. It’s like digging through a retro collection for diamonds in the rough, but there’s more diamond than rough. It has honestly changed the way I approach video games and gaming in general. Also, Party House is so good.
Hades 2 is pretty much exactly what I was hoping it would be. No notes.
I also played Clair Obscur, DK Bananza, Mario Kart World, and Silksong. Those are all good games, but none of them hooked me.
Most of those games are ones I’ve never heard of before, but you’ve really sold me on them, especially Split Fiction and UFO 50
(Mini tangent, but I find it interesting how, in this age of algorithmically driven slip content, I cherish the opportunity to find little snippets of meaningful connection with my fellow humans. Like, I don’t know you, or anything really about your preferences or tastes in games, so what reason is there to put much weight in your recommendations? You’re just a random person on the internet, after all. But no, your recommendations feel meaningful because you’re a person who cared enough about these things to write about them, and matters to me (especially in our current climate))
If I was going to try out Split Fiction and UFO 50, which would you recommend I start with?
I fully understand what you mean. I got turned on to UFO 50 the exact same way, from a stranger’s recommendation online. They referred to it as “a master class in game design”, and I was like, that’s exactly what I was just saying about Split Fiction!
I think how we say things is important to how we connect.
Anyway, Split Fiction requires two players. The whole game is in split screen, even if you play online. But you only need one copy of the game to play online - I think your partner can just download a special version of the game for free. But if you have someone to play with in the same room, I recommend that.
A bit more about UFO 50 if you haven’t already looked it up: it’s a faux-retro game collection from a fictional, defunct 80s game developer called UFOSoft.
Fifty is an insane number of games, and it’s got so much damn content. There are space shooters, side scrollers, a wild west Final-Fantasy-style RPG, a roguelike, a soccer game inspired by Bubble Bobble, at least three golf games, and then whatever the hell Mooncat is. There’s also a dark meta-narrative hidden between the games that describes why the company went under.
So UFO 50 is a deep dive. You may want to start there first, because it’s something you’ll likely bounce off of and come back to. Luckily you have literally 50 games to switch between if you get frustrated.
When it does get frustrating, it’s so rewarding if you power through it. Several of the games are in the style of those ridiculously punishing 80’s arcade games, except it mostly is just a style. If you keep an open mind and look for what the game is trying to show you, you start to see that there are modern design conventions underpinning everything that make the games more fair than they appear. (Except Caramel Caramel. That game is bullshit.)
That’s part of what I meant when I said it changed how I approach games. I realized I can spend so much time on my own expectations that I don’t see what’s in front of me. Learning to approach these games with an open mind has been a defining moment for me.
Haven’t played Silksong yet, but its release did get me to play Hollow Knight which had been sitting in my library forever.
I’ve gotten partway through Expedition 33, but decided to take a break after spending ~20 hours on act 1 alone (speaking of, I think it’s about time to get back on that soon).
As much as I like single player games, I imagine the most significant amount of my time by far has probably been spent on multiplayer games like cod
I don’t wanna hype you up too much - but I’d been looking forward to playing Silksong almost since it was announced and had very high expectations, and it did not disappoint!
Abiotic Factor, has been a pearl. Survival in a 90’s science center complex in the middle of Australia. Good mechanics once you get past the water hump. The story has the right amounts of dread and humor, and the stakes /difficulty / rewards ramp up just right for me.
Oh and still playing noita… Finally cleared it this year
I’ve played Abiotic twice and have enjoyed it, but both times I’ve stopping before finishing it. I’ve been playing solo and know that playing with friends is a much better experience but sadly none of my friends want to buy it. Would you say it’s worth finishing? I’ve gotten to third third lab area
Even though I did not like it at first because of the (optional) management and (also optional) zoomed out cut-out camera view. I loved Silent Hunter and was hoping for a modern take but the above mentioned features of the game kind of clashed with my expectations. Luckily, there is a captain 1st person only mode and walking through your super detailed boat as the captain while listening to 40s radio stations (through mods) and blasting British freighters with well calculated torpedo shots is a lot of fun.
Skyrim VR ( MadGodsMod)
It is always fun to play Skyrim from time to time, but this version has to be my favourite, and after finally having a PC that is beefy enough for VR makes this ancient game one of my highlights this year.
Attending Combo Breaker is the highlight of my year every year. In 2025 I was able to fit Frosty Faustings into my travel budget too. Managed to place 17th in Mystery Bracket both times, and they were very wild bracket runs. I saw Gyakuten Puzzle Bancho and turned to my opponent to utter a sentence no one wants to hear in Mystery: "I'm sorry, I know how to play this game." Also at CB I was able to make it out of pools in Under Night In-Birth II, and it was a hella stacked bracket so I'm pretty happy with that one.
Been focusing more on my mahjong career, attended Riichi Nomi Open and Philadelphia Riichi Open as my first two tournaments. Didn't do so hot though. But of course, when I win it's because I'm skilled, when I lose it was just bad luck.
New arcade opened up near me with modded Maimai, Wacca, and Chunithm cabinets. I told myself I'm never going back to Round 1 again, though R1 does have the new official international Maimai now so I guess that's something. I also got back into Dance Dance Revolution a little, but I'm still not very good.
As for actual new releases, Deltarune is obvious. Kirby Air Riders is a sequel I waited 22 years for, and it was worth the wait. The original is one of my favorite games of all time and I'm blown away by how much higher they raised the bar. Online City Trial is everything childhood me ever dreamed of. And I have to shout out Rhythm Doctor finally exiting Early Access, the final chapter is a wonderful conclusion that gave me a lot of emotions.
(*note some of these were Let’s Play’s I watched instead of played as combat mechanics like Clair/Wukong don’t interest me.)
I also spent a lot of time with an old friend, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Tribes of the East.
Edit/PS: Have to include Tactical Breach Wizards. Hilarious and very different take on the “Xcom-esque” genre. Great characterization and story. Requires a very different style of thinking to master it.
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