Cozy Space Survivors is a short (few hours) cozy survivor-like indie game with pixel graphics. A run is only ten minutes, so it works also for people with not too much time. It is developed by a single person and it is his first release.
I’ve also tried a whole bunch, my favourite is probably Rogue: Genesia, I really like the challenges and metaprogression over some of the other titles I’ve tried
Heaven’s Vault is a game about archaeology and translating a dead language. You explore a unique solar system and discover ruins, in which you uncover artifacts, and bits of text. Through context clues, you translate the passages to uncover the storyline. It’s not difficult, so if you’re looking for a puzzle, this won’t really do it for you, but it’s more of a narrative experience. If you aren’t sure about a word or phrase, you can give it a guess (based on assigning words from a collection of possible translations to specific symbols), and the game will remember that choice and let you slowly revise your translations as you find new text that rules out prior incorrect guesses. There’s an interconnected storyline with multiple paths to follow, and a very unique world - haven’t seen anything like it in other games.
The game has a NG+ mode wherein you start with all of your translations from the first playthrough intact, but, most of the bits of text are considerably longer and more involved, letting you use your prior knowledge to uncover more of the story and the lore of the world, which is also neat.
Didn’t know that! Was going based off of the review score; 1600 reviews in 5 years seemed pretty little-known. All the same, don’t mind the downvotes - that’s the point of the thread after all. :)
This sounds really interesting. I'm gonna put this on my wishlist in hopes it goes on sale or something. Can't justify $25 right now due to circumstances.
If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy Chants of Sennar! It’s also about translating languages; it’s more puzzle-oriented and less story-based; there’s a story to uncover, but it’s not as clear-cut and narrative driven. Still a great game, however!
Sci-fi, you’re dropped down to a lush alien planet to do what humans do best: strip all of its natural resources! Combat is limited, but boils down to fighting off wild animals - the main gist of the game is building and optimizing things like miners/conveyor belts/smeltors/assemblers/etc to automate the pillaging of the environment with increasing efficiency… which admittedly sounds more like work than play, but this title caught me a bit off guard with how fun and - true to its name - satisfying it is play.
It’s a 3D first person game instead of a 2D isometric, and most of the differences stem from that. More manual building (they added blueprints but I don’t know how good they are), infinite resource sources which means setting up a mining outpost is permanent. Much less focus on fighting wildlife, though that is present.
Overall, it’s a much more relaxing, slower paced game than Factorio. Both are good at different aspects of the same thing.
Being able to build vertically makes it a very different experience. Using a hyper tube chain to yeet yourself all the way across the map is chef’s kiss.
The blueprints are helpful for mid to late game when you need to set up dozens of the same thing. It’s not a perfect system, but can definitely be a time saver.
The combat is totally different. There’s no raid/defense mechanism. The mobs have a fixed spawn point. They’ll stop respawning once you start building around that point. Once you learn the appropriate attack/dodge maneuver for each type, they’re barely even a nuisance to kill.
Just a warning: The current version has performance issues, it stutters like crazy even on beefy setups. It seems they didn’t get the level streaming implementation of UE5 right on the first try. This will probably get fixed for 1.0, but currently it’s painful playing in some parts of the map.
Ubisoft’s bread and butter were never assassin’s creed type hardcore games, but those trashy looking pet sims you could find in the bargain bin. The only reason they’re able to make the hardcore gamerz stuff is because of the financial security the shitty pet games brought in
There was an old flash game called “You Only Live Once”
It’s basically a rudimentary mario-like platformer. But once you die, the game just cuts to your funeral. Each time you load up the game again, it just shows time passing as your grave slowly ages and is forgotten.
This feels like it’d be great for a networked game where what you do gets passed onto other players so eventually someone can finish it. Souls-like or Death Stranding-like multiplayer style. The issue is it’d probably take a lot of effort to make in a way that be interesting and take long enough, and also if it can only be done once then that sucks for making money. I guess it could use procedural elements and make it replayable, but that’d probably remove some of the charm.
I would just talk to your kid and listen to his feelings and wants. What does he enjoy about Roblox? Can he find that enjoyment with some other games? Does he understand that its not a punishment, e.g. it’s not anything that he did and that you aren’t blaming him? Sure, you can suggest a few alternatives and they might take and be fun, but you’ll need to be attuned to his feelings around what he might see as a punishment for something that he did so that he doesn’t internalize it and hurt the relationship you have with him.
yeah this should be the immediate next step. The kid shouldn’t feel punished. It shouldn’t be a “you’re not allowed because I said so.” Kids can be smart and might be able to understand why Roblox is exploitative.
At least this is a better reason to take a way a kid’s video game. My parents banned me from certain games/movies because they had positive depictions of black people.
no, just very idiosyncratic white American racists. I don’t even know where they got it from. My grandparents weren’t racists and my parents never listened to Rush Limbaugh or anything.
Nah, they don’t watch that either. They’re very detached and only watch football or movies with Humphrey Bogart. My best guess is they felt some kind of resentment their whole lives because they were always the poorest ones out of their siblings. All my aunts and uncles formed businesses or got moderately wealthy, whereas I grew up on the lower middle side of that spectrum. And that turned into standard American racism.
What you're describing isn't real, but even if it was, it wouldn't warrant a refund. You can't play 100 hours then make up phantom bugs to get your money back.
Sony changed their CPU architecture every time until PS4/5. The only reason some PS3s could play PS2 games is because they had also had PS2 hardware in them. Xbox has been x86 the whole time.
The simple answer is that microsoft is a far more advanced company in terms of programming an OS, the gap shows when you compare console securities, where virtually every nintendo or sony device had software vulnerabilities, while microsoft consoles tended to need to be hardmodded
As someone who programmed drivers for nt, it’s not, the reason it’s easier is because they started later.
Xbox is a mature x86 windows platform, vs ps1 which is an embedded mips system.
They started with their windows directx stack and just kept with it, while ps did a random walk all over the place.
Msft also had really boring hardware, like, they started with a crappy pc, then made a crappy ppc pc, then went back to a crappy pc. The software was simplistic, while Sony made really interesting hardware designs, that turned out to be hard to program, till the ps4 when they just gave up.
Msft traditionally isn’t very good at operating systems, they’ve just had infinite resources and infinite monkeys for 40+ years, and they’ve been stubborn enough to make it work somehow.
I would argue they had to give it up to get the indie scene onboard as I heard many nightmare stories for indies from PS3 era. Was it worth it? I’m sure contributed a great deal to the success of PS4 but it made the PS into just a more affordable gaming PC.
Totally worth it, they spent unimaginable resources trying to make those architectures programmable, now that’s all almost free, they just compete for published titles and maybe some secondary features.
MSFT was in a better position because they didn’t need to spend those resources, and more importantly the devs didn’t either, they could write windows games then port them over easily. Now it’s just as easy to do that for ps4/5. All that matters is nailing exclusives and looking cool, plus some marketing which msft sucks at.
It’s too early to decide if it was. Yes it was the safest bet, Even though PS4 had a great deal of success you also need to keep in mind, a lot of it was because of politics. Nintendo and MS made huge mistakes at that time and Sony basically ate their lunch.
The older generations were always innovative and pushed the envelop as far as possible, but now PS just a gaming PC that is not upgradable like an actual PC. if you don’t recall, the most hyped thing about PS5 was the controller, which is not what you expect the main point of buying a new consol to be.
On the topic of exclusives, I personally hate them. I think it makes a false sense of value in modern consoles where in the past they were intentionally made to take advantage of the architecture to showcase the unique quirks (and ofc the power) of this machine in a tiny box. Now they are usually just political leverages even though the games can be ported to other platforms.
So to reiterate, I agree it definitely had positive net for Sony in the short run, we’ll have to wait and see if it will payout in the long run.
Exclusives are terrible for the customer, but they’re a way for corporate to control the market, which is a good for them.
We’ll see, but I was on the dev side of that nightmare, Sony would have gotten crushed the next gen, they barely made it out of ps3 with their extended developers in tact, nobody liked programming the cell, everybody loves the current system.
But it does reduce competitive surface area, so we’ll see. Nintendo is winning now because they didn’t follow the same path but they did innovate, more than almost anyone before.
My question is: What innovation do you see that could have been worth a unique architecture to Sony’s developers?
I agree with your sentiment, after all what is a game console without games.
What I want isn’t necessarily a unique architechture, rather I want a unique experience. I think looking at Smartphone landscape expresses my concerns much clearer. All phones today are basically just reskins of same phone in design, purpose and architechture. Sure there are some novelty phones with smaller audiences for the sake of novelty but what makes you choose a phone over the other is just marketing at this point. I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed with consoles. The difference is the home consoles are replaceable.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to use the phone metaphor, every improvement in one phone rapidly spread to others, so even budget phones have features better than the top of the line phones a decade ago.
Now game developers can go back to focusing on games, and console makers can focus on trying to make better consoles without having to blow ludicrous resources on supporting developers or just making the thing work, they just rely on amd making better chips which seems to have worked.
I totally get where you’re going, and I agree we need that macro-innovation as it were, but games were a nightmare of hacks and bullshit for decades, I think a period of consolidation is good right now, then we can start the whole race all over again with crazy new tech.
It doesnt say anything about modern consoles though. Although its dofferent at the start, their modern consoles are still effectively full of exploits. Hell VERY recently, “backup” PS4 titles are running on the PS5. Security is the main reason why BOTH the PS5 and the Nintendo Switch do not have easily accessible web browsers while Microsoft can.
I heard that the Xbox is basically like a PC (since Microsoft is so adept at this), so backwards compatibility is natural. But what you said about x86 architecture is interesting.
The original Xbox, Xbox One, and S/X are all basically x86 PCs, but the 360 was basically a Power Mac. Microsoft was literally using PowerMac G5 towers as early development kits for the 360.
Supporting 360 games is pretty time consuming and requires emulation. MS has been slowly chipping away at it for years.
The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft's whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.
The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft's core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn't necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).
Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin's "Übershaders" - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One's CPU design, similarly to how Apple's M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.
Microsoft's APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.
The PowerPC cores aren’t the problem, emulating that is pretty straightforward. It’s the many SPUs that present a huge headache to emulate in a performant manner.
And yeah, MS building everything on Windows and DirectX also makes things considerably easier.
Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I'm aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you're absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.
Luckily, I think most games either didn't do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.
Why do consumers let them? It’s just step one of enshittification : first, be nice to your customers until they become dependent on you and you’re the only game in town…
On one hand, regulators allowed big companies to become monopolies, so we don’t have a choice. Imagine if instagram and whatsapp were not part of facebook, how different social media would be? Or if bumble and hinge were competing with tinder, not just all being a part of match.com.
And on the other hand, we have examples like the console “war”, where Xbox messed up this generation so hard, that Sony now can do whatever they want.
I don’t buy it. PC and Nintendo are more than enough competition. Sony has always been this way and they always will be. Company culture doesn’t change, Nintendo will always be letigious, Microsoft will always seek acquisitions and Sony will always be arrogant.
For what it’s worth, Robin Walker and his team are working on the next half life after Alyx. Will that ever come out? I have no idea and I’m not expecting anything. Deadlock however is a game designed by one of the grandfathers of the moba genre, and has had over 20k concurrent players at any given time, and it wasn’t even announced with it’s existence only known through word of mouth. That’s insanely impressive and shows how huge the moba genre really is and how those players are thirsty for a new game from a big company. It sucks and I wish we had more sp valve games but I’m content with the work they’ve done on proton, steamos, the steam deck, steam itself, and half life alyx. They haven’t been sitting on their hands not doing anything, they’ve been putting their focus on more technical areas versus making games and that’s ok.
It’s called HLX, and it’s apparently a traditional non-vr game. Robin Walker was leading the Alyx team, it’s a safe bet he’s leading this team or working with this team on the sequel.
Having HL:A Alyx be VR was super cool. The game was so immersive and for a while afterwards, I was convinced that any furure HL game had to be VR. Then the novelty wore off and the VR market basically is basically dead. Now I’m excited for another flat screen HL game.
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