tal

@tal@lemmy.today

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

tal,

Markdown treats a single newline as a space, so that already wrapped text doesn’t need to be rewrapped. If you want to have each item on one line, some options:

Two spaces before newline


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Backslash before newline


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Most clients will have a “larger” vertical space if you do this. Use a double newline:


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tal,

I doubt that it has anything to do with social preferences of anyone internal to payment processors. They won’t care.

Putting pressure on payment processors is a useful way to put pressure on any commercial service. The commercial service may operate in another country, but it needs the payment processor, and the payment processors don’t want to be ejected from countries. The payment processor can be a lever for laws passed elsewhere.

tal,

There’s a whole class of controllers, often called “fightsticks”, which have a full-size arcade-style joystick and a ton of buttons, to reproduce the feel of arcade fighting games.

www.reddit.com/r/fightsticks/

!fightsticks (not very active)

www.amazon.com/Arcade-Sticks/s?k=Arcade+Sticks

tal,

“Fallout is the big one,” Middler claimed. “There are multiple Fallout projects in development, including, as far as I’m aware, that one that I’m sure you’re all wanting. It’s not far enough in along to say anything like ‘you’re going to be playing this game anytime soon’.”

Middler then joked, “Anyway, New Vegas 2, coming soon”. Is this the one we’re “all wanting”? Yes, but then also so is Fallout 3 Remastered, Fallout 5 and even a remake of Fallout 2. The fanbase is rabid, and hungry, and it’s been a long time since they’ve been fulfilled outside of Fallout 76 updates.

I mean, if Bethesda released all four of those, I’d buy all four.

I also don’t know what “Fallout 3 Remastered” entails, but if it means forward-porting the content to Starfield’s engine, that’d be pretty cool, though I do wonder how much effort will be required for mod-porting.

tal,

Honestly, I feel like Morrowind is the title least in need of a remaster, as unlike later 3D titles, it has an open-source fan reimplementation of the engine, OpenMW, plus the fan updates of content.

searches for video of content

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnvOy5Kw79Y

It looks like the OpenMW people are also working on a VR version.

tal,

There’s a similar, open-source game, https://www.luanti.org/ (until recently, known as Minetest). It doesn’t have as many mods in 2025 as Minecraft does, but you might also enjoy it.

tal,

I love CDDA, but I don’t know if I’d call it light on a battery. It won’t hammer a GPU, but it actually does use a fair bit of CPU time for the simulation. Also, every time it redraws a frame, it does so via recomputing the world lighting and such, so it’s actually surprisingly heavyweight.

tal,

kagis

docs.luanti.org/for-players/controls/

Touchscreen

Display inventory: Press on-screen button in left lower corner

tal,

Not ignored—not played yet.

Journal, July 3, 2025:

The day opened with a round of https://store.steampowered.com/app/2478330/Barbie_Project_Friendship/.

I then followed it up with survival horror https://store.steampowered.com/app/1944430/Amnesia_The_Bunker/ from survival horror specialists Frictional Games.

Next on the list was gay dom/sub dating sim https://store.steampowered.com/app/2747220/Blood_Domination/.

Then hard milsim https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076160/Command_Modern_Operations/.

I wound down with some relaxing time in art toy https://store.steampowered.com/app/1418570/Zen_Trails/.

I have always been partial to variety.

tal,

Sure, but I think that the type of game is a pretty big input. Existing generative AI isn’t great at portraying a consistent figure in multiple poses and from multiple angles, which is something that many games are going to want to do.

On the other hand, I’ve also played text-oriented interactive fiction where there’s a single illustration for each character. For that, it’d be a good match.

AI-based speech synth isn’t as good as human voice acting, but it’s gotten pretty decent if you don’t need to be able to put lots of emotion into things. It’s not capable of, say, doing Transistor, which relied a lot on the voice acting. But it could be a very good choice to add new material for a character in an old game where the actor may not be around or who may have had their voice change.

I’ve been very impressed with AI upscaling. I think that upscaling textures and other assets probably has a lot of potential to take advantage of higher resolution screens. Maybe one might need a bit of human intervention, but a factor of 2 increase is something that I’ve found that the software can do pretty well without much involvement.

tal,

From the article, I believe that it’s Steam Deck parts, not Steam Controller 1 parts.

Which makes sense, because you can get a Steam Deck, but the Steam Controller 1 has been out of production for some years.

EDIT: Wikipedia says that production ended in 2019.

tal, (edited )

They have mechanical components that will wear out over time (though I suppose some people probably use them lightly enough that it’s less of an issue).

tal,

Yeah, I really liked https://store.steampowered.com/app/1620/Jagged_Alliance_2_Gold/. The UI is pretty elderly today, though.

I haven’t been very impressed with some of the subsequent attempts to revive the series, though I still haven’t gotten around to playing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084160/Jagged_Alliance_3/ yet, and that has much better scores than some of the intervening releases, like https://store.steampowered.com/app/57740/Jagged_Alliance__Back_in_Action/. If you haven’t tried JA3 yet either, you might consider taking a look.

EDIT: Oh, wait, yes I did play it, because I remember the intro mission that they have screenshots of.

…steamstatic.com/…/ss_0edc29526ad201a59357234cd77…

https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1084160/ss_0edc29526ad201a59357234cd77a34a5ba507208.1920x1080.jpg

I don’t recall finishing the game, though. I should go back and see what my status in that game is. Thanks for making me think of it.

tal,

Cannon Fodder - a UK classic, very arcadey but very fun and lighter than all these other “serious” games

It has that iconic theme music:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASTLGt_9vbU

tal, (edited )

Just tried it, and it was some other game I was thinking of; I hadn’t played JA3 yet.

While I haven’t finished the game, thoughts:

  • It’s the strongest of the post-2 Jagged Alliance games that I’ve played.
  • Still not on par with JA2, at least relative to release year, I’d say also in absolute terms.
  • My biggest problem — I’m running this under Proton — is some bugginess that I’m a little suspicious is a thread deadlock. When it happens, I never see the targeting options show up when I target an enemy, and trying to go to the map or inventory screen doesn’t update the visible area onscreen, though I can blindly click and hear interactions. The game also doesn’t ever exit if I hit Alt-F4 in that state, just hangs. AFAICT, this can always be resolved by quicksaving (which you can do almost anywhere), stopping the game (I use kill in a terminal on Linux) and reloading the save, but it’s definitely obnoxious. Fortunately, the game starts up pretty quickly. Nobody on ProtonDB talking about it, so maybe it’s just me. I have not noticed bugs other than this one.
  • So far, not much by way of missions where one has to figure out elaborate ways of getting into areas or the like: more of a combat focus. I have wirecutters, crowbars, lockpicks, and explosives, like in JA2, but thus far, it’s mostly just a matter of clicking on a locked container with someone who has lockpicking skill. Probably more realistic — in real life, an unattended door isn’t going to stop anyone for long — but I kinda miss that.
  • The maps feel a lot smaller to me, though the higher resolution might be part of that. A lot of 3d modeling to make them look pretty. There’s a lot more verticality, like watchtowers.
  • The game also feels considerably shorter than JA2, based on the percentage of the strategic map that I’ve taken. That being said, JA2 could get a bit repetitive when one is fighting the umpteenth enemy reinforcement party.
  • Unique perks for mercs that make them a lot more meaningful than in JA2 (though also limit your builds). For example, Fox can get what is basically a free turn if she initiates combat on a surprised enemy. Barry auto-constructs explosives each day.
  • Thematic feel of the mercs from JA2 is retained well.
  • Interesting perk tree.
  • A bunch of map modifiers like fog that have a major impact.
  • Bunch of QoL stuff for scheduling concurrent tasks for different mercs.
  • Pay demands don’t seem to rise with level, though other factors can drive it up (e.g. Fox will demand more pay if you hire Steroid).
  • Feels easier than JA2, though I haven’t finished it.
  • I’m pretty sure the keybindings are different.
  • Tiny thing, but I always liked the start of JA2, where your initial team does a fast-rope helicopter insertion into a hostile sector. Felt like a badass way to set the tone. No real analog in JA3.
  • I started running into guys with RPGs early on in JA3, much earlier than in JA2.
  • JA2 has ground vehicles and a helicopter and they require you to obtain fuel. Transport logistics don’t exist in JA3, other than paying to embark on boat trips at a port (and just checked online to confirm that they aren’t just in the late game).
  • More weapon mods in JA3. Looks like some interesting tradeoffs that one has to make here, rather than just “later-game stuff is better”.

For me, it was a worthwhile purchase — even with the irritating bug I keep hitting — and I would definitely recommend it over the other post-JA2 stuff if you’ve played JA2 and want more. It hasn’t left me giggling at the insane amount of complex interactions that were coded into the game like JA2 did, though, which were kind of a hallmark of the original.

tal, (edited )

What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).

I don’t know what the internal mechanics are like, haven’t read material about it. From a user standpoint, I have just a list of positive and negative factors impacting my hit chance, so less information about my hit chance. I guess I’d vaguely prefer the percentage — I generally am not a huge fan of games that have the player rely on mechanics trying to hide the details of those mechanics — but it’s nice to know what inputs are present. It hasn’t been a huge factor to me one way or the other, honestly; I mean, I feel like I’ve got a solid-enough idea of roughly what the chances are.

even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.

Yeah, I don’t know of other things that have the strategic aspect. For the squad-based tactical turn-based combat, there are some options that I’ve liked playing in the past.

While https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/ aren’t quite the same thing — they’re closer to Fallout 1 and 2, as Wasteland 1 was a major inspiration for them — the squad-based, turn-based tactical combat system is somewhat similar, and if you’re hunting for games that have that, you might also enjoy that.

I also played https://store.steampowered.com/app/254960/Silent_Storm_Gold_Edition/ and enjoyed it, though it’s now pretty long in the tooth (well, so is Jagged Alliance 2…). Even more of a combat focus. Feels lower budget, slightly unfinished.

And there’s X-Com. I didn’t like the new ones, which are glitzy, lots of time spent doing dramatic animations and stuff, but maybe I should go back and give them another chance.

tal,

Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.

They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.

Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.

tal,

It really depends on how one is applyng mods. Bethesda does have their own mod site and in-game support for modding, and that’s pretty straightforward (and the only option on consoles). That will limit what mods are available.

I do kind of wish that there were one cross-platform open-source universal “game mod” program that could support multiple online services. Would like to have Wabbajack-like functionality (apply a whole set of curated, tested-together mods) as a base too, as that’d lower the bar.

tal,

Obligatory

tal,

Capitalism deals with industry being owned privately.

If you want to complain about Microsoft being a publicly-traded, private-sector company rather than a worker cooperative or part of the government or whatever, okay, at least I can see where you’re coming from.

But a socialist economy is perfectly compatible with having high prices.

[Solved] Trying to remember a game (military battle simulator)

I’m trying to remember a video game from about ten to twenty years ago. It was a tactical military battle simulator. It was played from a bird’s eye view. The player could move units like vehicles and infantry groups around a map and needed to defeat enemy troops. The simulation of the combat itself was very detailed. After...

tal,

A lot of real-time tactics and turn-based tactics games would fit that description.

Matrix Games specializes in milsims, so they’re an easy way to get a list.

www.matrixgames.com/inventory?sort=new-releases&f…

As another commenter says, having more criteria to narrow it down would help.

I like the Close Combatseries myself, which is real-time.

tal,

I like single-player D&D.

tal,

I enjoyed Bastion and Transistor.

I also preferred Hades to either.

tal, (edited )

Just out of curiosity, listing the games mentioned here as of this writing by their date of release:

Release Date Game
1980 Pac-Man
1985 The Oregon Trail (assuming widely-played 1985 game)
1985 Tetris
1986 Kid Icarus
1988 Mega Man 2
1988 Super Mario Brothers 3
1988 The Guardian Legend
1989 Abadox: The Deadly Inner War
1989 Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II
1989 Monster Party
1989 Populous
1989 Sweet Home
1990 Dr. Mario
1990 Final Fantasy III
1991 Battletoads (assuming original game)
1991 The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
1992 Ecco the Dolphin
1992 Sonic the Hedgehog 2
1992 Super Mario Kart
1993 Dinopark Tycoon
1993 Doom
1993 Gauntlet IV
1993 Lufia & the Fortress of Doom (assuming first game)
1993 Mega Man X
1994 Donkey Kong Country
1994 Earthworm Jim
1994 Sonic & Knuckles
1994 Sonic the Hedgehog 3
1994 Super Metroid
1994 The Lion King
1995 Chrono Trigger
1997 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
1997 Diablo
1997 Final Fantasy VII
1997 Mega Man X4
1997 Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
1997 Snowboard Kids
1998 Banjo-Kazooie
1998 Metal Gear Solid
1998 Sonic Adventure
1998 South Park
1998 StarCraft: Brood War
1999 Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
1999 Heroes of Might and Magic III
1999 Planescape: Torment
1999 Quake III Arena
1999 RollerCoaster Tycoon
1999 Silent Hill
1999 Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
1999 Sven Co-op
1999 Unreal Tournament
1999 Worms Armageddon
2000 Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
2000 Diablo II
2000 Resident Evil CODE: Veronica
2000 SimCity 3000 Unlimited
2000 Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
2001 Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies
2001 Final Fantasy X
2001 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
2001 Shenmue II
2002 The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
2003 Beyond Good & Evil
2003 Need for Speed: Underground
2003 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
2004 Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
2004 Champions of Norrath
2004 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
2004 Gran Turismo 4
2004 Half Life 2
2004 Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
2004 The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
2005 Champions: Return to Arms
2005 Psychonauts
2005 Shadow of the Colossus
2006 Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
2006 Ōkami
2007 BioShock
2007 Dark Souls
2007 Mass Effect
2007 Portal
2008 Clonk Rage
2008 Left 4 Dead
2008 Mirror’s Edge
2008 Super Smash Bros. Brawl
2009 Dragon Age: Origins
2009 Forza Motorsport 3
2009 Killing Floor
2009 Left 4 Dead 2
2009 Plants vs. Zombies
2009 Steins;Gate
2010 Battlefield: Bad Company 2
2010 Limbo
2010 Nier
2010 Planet Minigolf
2011 Bastion
2011 Portal 2
2011 Terraria
2011 The Binding of Isaac
2012 Hotline Miami
2012 The House in Fata Morgana
2012 Tokyo Jungle
2014 Forza Horizon 2
2014 LISA: The Painful
2015 Bloodborne
2015 Ori and the Blind Forest
2015 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
2015 Undertale
2016 Doom (2016)
2016 Kirby: Planet Robobot
2016 Stardew Valley
2016 The Witness
2016 Titanfall 2
2016 Tyranny
2017 Little Nightmares
2017 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (for Deluxe version)
2017 Nier: Automata
2017 Night in the Woods
2017 Super Mario Odyssey
2017 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2018 Celeste
2018 Donut County
2018 Return of the Obra Dinn
2018 Rimworld
2018 Subnautica
2019 A Short Hike
2019 Disco Elysium
2019 Outer Wilds
2019 Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
2019 Slay the Spire
2020 Cyberpunk 2077
2020 Factorio
2020 Hades
2021 Everhood: An Ineffable Tale of the Inexpressible Divine Moments of Truth
2021 Psychonauts 2
2022 Elden Ring
2022 Lil Gator Game
2023 Baldur’s Gate 3
2023 Dave the Diver
2024 Balatro
tal,

I don’t know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.

I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be “good” games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.

But I’m not in the EU or UK.

I also am kind of puzzled by this:

www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

Isn’t the law on this already settled?

A: It mostly is within the United States, but not in many other countries.

It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:

carltonfields.com/…/youve-been-served-legal-effec…

Of course, case law has never really been settled on whether games are goods or services. Right, Steve?

Steve Blickensderfer: No. No, I haven’t been able to figure this out one way or the other looking at the cases.

A few quick searches haven’t picked up US case law, if it’s out there.

tal,

There are a number of Dune games.

tal,

en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_games_based_on_Dune

tal, (edited )

Star Citizen is a scam.

I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly-mismanaged development process that ran out of control, and where they have no realistic way of fulfilling all the promises they made at this point.

This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.

In a traditional development environment, the publisher would have bailed on this a long time ago.

EDIT: I do think that it does highlight two things, though:

  • The risks with this kind of funding structure for game development.
  • The fact that there are a lot of people who really badly want a modern, good space combat video game.
tal,

that has promised not one but two games that are not coming out.

Not just the games. Don’t forget all the feelies, the physical stuff they promised to manufacture.

This guy lost a court case trying to get a refund on his $5k seven years back:

vice.com/…/star-citizen-court-documents-reveal-th…

Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”

That was back when only $200 million had been sunk into the development.

tal, (edited )

I really don’t think that it’s all that abnormal, aside from the funding structure.

Lots of video games — including even some pretty successful ones — have dev studios that screw up the scope when they estimate what they can accomplish with their financial and hardware budget.

The problem is that if you’re a video game developer and you look at the state of your game and you know that it doesn’t meet up with what you’re hoping to make, you can maybe go to the publisher and say “we screwed up and need more money”. And the publisher — who is familiar with the industry and has the ability to actually come in and take a look at what’s going on with your development process and has bean-counters whose job is to make a cold, clear-eyed call on this — is one entity who is hopefully is going to make an objective call.

But with Star Citizen, that structure doesn’t exist. The developer can just keep go begging for more money.

Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana: “The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past.”

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever: “Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.” That was self-funded, so there wasn’t some outside party saying “no more”.

In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] A small team of ex-employees, which later became Triptych Games, continued development from their homes.[14]

In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.

The problem is that the developer knows perfectly well that the game doesn’t meet the kind of standard that they’d hoped for and which they’d gotten players expecting, but they aren’t willing to cut their losses and just wrap things up. And the publisher wasn’t in a position to cut development off. In Duke Nukem Forever’s case, happened when they exhausted their own capital, because employees aren’t gonna work without pay.

But in Star Citizen’s case, even that brake doesn’t exist. They aren’t using their capital. They’re using player capital that they got in exchange for promises, and I don’t think that players are nearly as good as an outside publisher at performing cold, hard, objective analysis of the development process. CIG dug themselves into a deep hole. Once they’re in that hole, there’s not really a good way out. If they just stop development at any given point, they aren’t going to have something that players are happy with. The only route they have out, to not fail, is to make more promises, try to get more money, and somehow try to develop their way to a successful game. So they’re gonna keep doing that until all of the players cut them off, which can take a long time. A publisher would say “you blew through numerous deadlines in the existing development process, and I don’t think that you’re a good investment”, or said “no more money unless you give me a hard, short timeline for wrapping this up”. I think that CIG knew pretty well that there was no point where they could wrap things up in a handful of months and meet player expectations, so their choice was always “fail” or “keep kicking the can down the road in hopes that they could fix things”.

tal,

I was listening to an interview with a senior EU translator several years back, and he said that these days, he normally does the first pass with Google Translate, then manually cleans things up. My guess is that to some extent, most human translations likely incorporate some AI translation already.

tal, (edited )

Not run through Steam, so no Steam stats (though available on Steam) but I’m sure that they’re way up there:

Some others with a fair bit of playtime:

tal, (edited )

Well I’m not them, but for me: KSP1: 1800.8 hours. Current cost $40 = $0.02 an hour

My electricity costs to run the game are higher than the cost of the game itself at that point.

EDIT: Keep in mind that some of these have DLC, and if you buy them, it increases the price. Kerbal Space Program with all DLC is $70; that’s still an extremely good value at 1800.8 hours, but does bump the number up. Fallout: New Vegas has (good) DLC that I would want; all DLC would take the game to $45. Civilization VI would go to $230 (and I assume that they’re still turning out DLC). I listed Stellaris myself, along with a lot of other people. I really liked the game, and even the base game is a good game, IMHO, but in typical Paradox game fashion, if you buy all the DLC, it adds up to quite a bit — $470 currently, and they’re still turning out DLC. Someone listed DCS, I have The Sims 3 on my list, Total War: Warhammer II. All of those games have pricey DLC libraries that, if purchased in total, run multiple hundreds or over a thousand dollars (with the Total War: Warhammer series using an unusual take on this, where prior games in the series also act as DLC for the current ones). They can still be pretty cost-competitive per hour with other games, but only if the person who buys them is actually playing them a a lot.

tal,

and Terraria are all close to 500h as well.

If you like Terraria, have you tried Starbound?

tal, (edited )

Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, if you want to have a useful sense of what kind of value you’re getting, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn’t some sort of fixed quantity per game – it colossally varies.

If the way one rates a game is to simply use the price of the game, and disregard how much you’re going to play the thing, then what you incentivize developers to do is either (a) produce games coming out with enormous amounts of DLC, as Paradox does, if you don’t count DLC price, (b) short games sold in “chapter” format, where someone buys multiple games to play what really amounts to one “game”, (c) games with in-app purchases, data-harvesting or some form of way to generate an in-game revenue stream, or simply (d) short, small games.

I have a lot of games that I could grind for many hours — but I haven’t done so, never will do so, because I’ve lost interest; they’re no longer providing fun gameplay. I’ve gotten my hours out of the game, though that number is decoupled from the number of hours to complete the game. I have other games that I’ve played to completion a number of times, and some games — particularly roguelikes/roguelites — which aim for extreme replayability. The hours matter, but it’s not the hours to complete the game that’s relevant, but the hours I’m interested in playing the game and have fun with it.

For some genres, this doesn’t vary all that much. Adventure games, I think, are a pretty good example of a genre where a player has to keep consuming new art and audio and writing and all that. They aren’t usually all that replayable, though there are certainly adventure games that are significantly shorter or longer. But you won’t be likely to find an adventure game that has ten, much less a hundred times as much reasonable gameplay as another adventure game.

But there are other genres, like roguelikes, where I don’t really need new content from an artist to keep being thrown my way for the game to continue to provide fun gameplay. There, the hours of fun gameplay in a game can become absolutely enormous, vary by orders of magnitude across games in the genre and relative to games in other genres.

tal,

There’s plenty of jrpgs half that price point with twice the length though.

Gotta like the JRPG genre for those hours to be fun, though.

I think the last major JRPG I was willing to play to completion was Final Fantasy V.

I’ll play the occasional CRPG, but JRPGs aren’t really my cup of tea.

tal, (edited )

I tend to like games that have lots of “levers” to play with and spend time figuring out, so I think that tends to be the unifying factor in the above games.

I don’t know of anything really comparable to Oxygen Not Included in terms of all the physics and stuff. I’d like something like it too (especially since Tencent bought ONI and now has some locked graphics for some in-game items that you can only get by enabling data-harvesting and then playing the game for a given amount of time, which I’m not willing to do. They don’t have an option to just buy that content. At least it’s optional.)

For Rimworld and Oygen Not Included, both are real-time colony sims. Of those, the closest stuff on my list is probably:

  • Dwarf Fortress (note that the commercial Steam build looks quite different from the classic version, has graphics and a mouse-oriented UI and revamped the UI and such, which may-or-may-not matter to you; if the learning curve being steep is an issue, that makes it a tad gentler). Rimworld is, in many ways, a simplified Dwarf Fortress in a sci-fi setting and without a Z-axis.
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/. Not a colony sim. You control a free-roaming squad (or squads) in an post-apocalyptic open world. That’s actually a bit like Rimworld. However, you can set up one or more outposts and set up automated production there. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and the early game is very difficult, as your character is weak and outclassed by almost everything. Focus is more on the characters, and less on the outpost-building – that’s more of a late-game goal. I find it to be pretty easy to go back and play more of. There’s a sequel in the works that’ll hopefully look prettier. Not really any other game I’m aware of in quite the same genre.

The other things on my list don’t really deal with building.

Oxygen Not Included has automated production. If you’re willing to go outside “colony sim”, there is a genre of “factory-building games” where one controls maybe a single character or base element and just tries to create a world of automated production stuff, maybe with tower defense elements. I’d probably recommend https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/ if you want 3D and a first-person view. I like it, but in my book, it doesn’t really compare with the games that I’ve racked up a ton of time on, winds up feeling a bit samey after a while, looks like I have thirty-some hours. https://mindustrygame.github.io/ is a free and open-source factory builder that you can grab off F-Droid for Android to play on-the-go; that and https://shatteredpixel.com/ are probably my open-source Android favorite games. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ has outstanding ratings, but I have not gotten around to playing it.

There are a few colony sim games sort of like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. I tried them, and none of them grabbed me as well as they did, but if you want to look at them:

  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/328080/Rise_to_Ruins/ is a colony sim and does have combat, but less focus on individual characters than Rimworld. I don’t like it mostly because the game is not really designed to be winnable, which I find frustrating. There’s growing “corruption” coming in from the edges of the map, and the aim is to try to last as long as possible before becoming overwhelmed; you can flee from it to other colonies. Technically, there are some ways to defeat the corruption, but not really how the game is intended to be played.
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/233450/Prison_Architect/. This has somewhat-similar graphics to Rimworld. You build and manage a prison. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t really have the open-world scope of Rimworld.
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062090/Timberborn/. This was in fairly Early Access the last time I spent much time on it, so I’m kind of out-of-date, and it looks like it’s still in EA. Doesn’t have the combat elements from Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress.
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/224500/Gnomoria/ is kind of like a much-simplified Dwarf Fortress. It didn’t really grab me, but maybe it’s your cup of tea.
tal,

I’m not going to say that there isn’t value there, but going from memory, I’m pretty sure that the engine has been open-source reimplemented.

kagis

Looks like there are a couple projects, but these seem to be actively-maintained and can run using the existing commercially-available game resources:

github.com/alexbatalov/fallout1-ce

Fallout Community Edition is a fully working re-implementation of Fallout, with the same original gameplay, engine bugfixes, and some quality of life improvements, that works (mostly) hassle-free on multiple platforms.

There is also Fallout 2 Community Edition.

Installation

You must own the game to play. Purchase your copy on GOG or Steam. Download latest release or build from source.

github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-ce

github.com/nadult/FreeFT

FreeFT is an open-source, real-time, isometric action game engine inspired by Fallout Tactics, a game from 2001 created by an Australian company, Micro Forte.

Running

To run this program, resources from original Fallout Tactics are required. You can buy it on GOG or Steam.

tal, (edited )

No prob. I’m reasonably confident that there are other multiple projects that have also done this; I just tried to list what looked like the most-currently-viable ones.

kagis

The first I think I remember seeing chronologically was FIFE, which IIRC was renamed from some slightly-different acronym from when it was intended to only run Fallout games. It looks like they’ve focused on becoming a generic RPG engine:

www.fifengine.net

FIFE is a free, open-source cross-platform game engine. It features hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, integrated GUI, audio support, lighting, map editor supporting top-down and isometric maps, pathfinding, virtual filesystem and more!

The core is written in C++ which means that it is highly portable. FIFE currently supports Windows, Linux and Mac.

Games utilizing FIFE are programmed through Python scripting layer on top of the base C++ API. Games can be also programmed using the C++ layer directly.

FIFE is open-sourced under the terms of the LGPL license so you can freely use it in non-commercial and commercial projects.

It sounds like they may have not taken it to full playability of the first two games; IIRC, the original intention was to do so:

falloutmod.fandom.com/wiki/FIFE

FIFE stands for Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine and is an open source project for the creation of cross platform ISO/top-down 2D games (e.g. RPGs & RTS’). The assets of Interplay’s RPG classics Fallout 1 & 2 are supported as test implementation but are not required to work with FIFE. It is not a Fallout emulator and you cannot play Fallout with it. The project’s goal is more universial. You can read graphics from fallout data files and create your own mods or draw you own content and make a completely new game.

Then there’s Falltergeist:

github.com/falltergeist/falltergeist

Falltergeist is an opensource alternative for Fallout 2 and Fallout 1 game engines. It uses C++, SDL and OpenGL. Falltergeist requires original Fallout resources to work.

But the last GitHub commit was three years ago, and the main site’s last blog update was in 2018.

There’s darkfo:

github.com/darkf/darkfo

A post-nuclear RPG remake

This is a modern reimplementation of the engine of the video game Fallout 2, as well as a personal research project into the feasibility of doing such.

It is written primarily in TypeScript and Python, and targets a modern (HTML 5) Web browser.

However, the last commit was six years ago.

There’s Harold, which is apparently a project continuing darkfo:

github.com/OldGamesLab/Harold

The project is based on darkfo codebase, but is modernized for Python 3, potentially with more improvements and bug fixes coming in the future.

Its last commit was three years ago.

There’s Fallout Equestria Reloaded — which apparently is some sort of unholy mating between My Little Pony and Fallout:

https://falloutequestriarpg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/image.png

github.com/Plaristote/fallout-equestria-reloaded

Qt-based game engine for Fallout-like RPGs, developed for the Fallout Equestria RPG project

I don’t think that the goal was so much to play Fallout as to use the assets to bootstrap a playable MLP RPG.

There have been commits in the past two months, so apparently someone is actually seriously plugging away.

Then there’s FOnline, another engine reimplementation, this one intended to be played multiplayer online:

github.com/cvet/fonline

Looks active.

www.fonline-reloaded.net

FOnline: Reloaded is a free to play post-nuclear MMORPG based on FOnline: 2238, an award-winning game set three years before the events of Fallout 2. FOnline: Reloaded provides you with a unique opportunity to revisit the ruins of California and explore the familiar locales from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

FOnline: Reloaded is a player-driven, persistent world MMORPG that allows you to participate in a wide range of activities, which range from faction wars to exploration, mining, scavenging for resources, caravan raids and more. The game puts a lot of emphasis on team play and dynamic, unscripted PvP action, but there is absolutely nothing to stop you from focusing on PvE dungeons or role-play.

FOnline: Reloaded is powered by the latest iteration of the FOnline Engine, which was created from scratch by Cvet and which is capable of utilizing assets imported from the original Fallout games, as well as Fallout: Tactics, Arcanum and Baldur’s Gate. The development of this engine started back in 2004 and continues to this day.

tal,

I think that you guys may have been kids in different decades.

tal,

gamesir.com/pages/brand-story

2013 Founding of GameSir by Yao Ma and the establishing of headquarter in Guangzhou, China.

I would assume that GameSir would also be affected by tariffs on China if 8bitdo is.

Cities Skylines 2, Kerbal Space 2, Planet Coaster 2, Frostpunk 2... What Went Wrong? angielski

Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money...

tal, (edited )

Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?

I mean, all series are going to have some point where they dick things up, else we’d have never-ending amazing video game series. I don’t think that the second game in the series is uniquely bad.

Some of it is just going to be luck. Like, hitting just the right combination of employees, market timing, consumer interest, design decisions, scoping a game’s development time and so forth isn’t a perfectly-understood science. Making the best game of the year probably means that a studio can make a good game, but that’s not the same thing as being able to consistently make the game of the year, year after year.

Some of it is novelty. I mean, part of most outstanding games is that they’re doing at least something that hasn’t been done before, and doing so again — especially if other studios are trying to copy and build on the winning formula as well — may not be enough.

Some of it is that most resources don’t always make a game better. I know that at least some past series have failed when a studio made a good game, (understandably) get more resources for the next game in the series, but then try to expand their scope and don’t do well at that new scope.

Engine rewrites are technically-risky, can get scope wrong, and a number of games that have really badly failed have happened because a studio tries to rebuild everything from the ground up rather than to do an incremental improvement.

You mention Cities: Skylines 2, and I think that “more resources don’t always help”, “luck”, and “engine rewrite” were all factors. When I play a city-builder, I really don’t care all that much about graphics; I’ve played and enjoyed some city-builders with really unimpressive graphics, like the original lincity. CS2 got a lot of budget and had a dev team that tried to use a lot of resources on graphics (which I think was already not a good idea, and not just due to my own preferences; reading player comments on things like Steam, what players were upset about were that they wanted more-interesting gameplay mechanics, not fancier graphics). Basically, trying to make the world’s prettiest city-builder with the money maybe wasn’t a good idea. Then they made some big internal technical shifts that involved some bad bets on how well some technology that they wanted to use for those graphics would work, and found that they’d dug themselves deeply into a hole.

Sometimes it’s a game trying to shift genres. To use the Fallout series as an example of both doing this what I’d call successfully and unsuccessfully, the Fallout series were originally isometric real-time-until-combat-then-turn-based games. With Fallout 3, Bethesda took the game to be a pausable 3D first-person-shooter series. That requires a whole lot of software and mechanics changes. That was, I think, successful — while the Wasteland series that the original Fallout games were based on continued the isometric turn-based model successfully, Fallout 3 became a really big hit. On the other hand, Fallout 76 was an attempt to take the series to be a live-action multiplayer game. That wasn’t the only problem — the game shipped in an extremely buggy state, after the team underestimated the technical challenges in taking their single-player game multiplayer. But some of it was just that the genre change took away some of what was nice about about the earlier games — lots of plot and story and scripted content and a world that the player was the center of and could change and an immersive environment that didn’t have other players acting out of character. The audience who loves a game in one genre isn’t necessarily a great fit for another genre. In that situation, it’s not so much that the developers don’t have a winning formula as that they’ve decided to toss their formula out and try to write a new one that’s as successful.

tal,

KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator

I think that there were pretty clear ways to expand KSP that I would have liked.

  • There was limited capacity to build bases and springboard off resources from those.
  • I’d have liked to be able to set up programmed flight sequences.
  • More mechanics, like radiation, micrometeorite impacts, etc.
  • The physics could definitely have been improved upon in a number of ways. I mean, I’ve watched a lot of rockets springily bouncing around at their joints.
  • Some of the science-gathering stuff was kind of…grindy. I would have liked that part of the game to be revamped.
  • I don’t think that graphics were a massive issue, but given how much time you spend looking at flames coming from rocket engines, it’d be nice to have improved on that somewhat. I’d have also liked some sort of procedural-terrain-generation system to permit for higher-resolution stuff when you’re on the ground; yeah, you’re mostly in the air or space, but when you’re on the ground, the fidelity isn’t all that great.
tal, (edited )

I’d kind of like Steam to have the ability to indicate games that can run offline in its Store and enforce this by running the game in a container without network access.

tal, (edited )

I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.

Among other things:

  • Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do…they didn’t used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
  • In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I’m searching for, but not a lower limit.
  • It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
  • Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
  • I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
  • I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.

I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.

That means:

  • In the Store search.
  • In the Library sidebar.
  • “Virtual categories” in the Library sidebar, which are basically “saved” searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
  • In Library “shelves”.
  • When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
  • When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
  • Any other places that I’ve missed.
tal,

Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack your enter key, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.

I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game angielski

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. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...

tal,

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.

tal, (edited )

In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

looks at my own Steam library, adds a shelf sorted by Release Date, looks for notable games

Satisfactory was released in 2024. It was in Early Access for some time before that. You mentioned that you liked it.

Ditto for https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/858210/Nova_Drift/, games that I’ve played quite a bit — 2024 release following time in Early Access.

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.

I liked https://store.steampowered.com/app/2379780/Balatro/, a roguelike deckbuilder, quite a bit.

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