If you enjoyed Control, I highly recommend Signalis. Similarly creepy, unsettling vibes from everything, lots of exploration and really tense combat, and a story that holds enough back to keep you wondering.
Nothing released this year will even come close to touching the Warframe 1999 soundtrack. Absolute bangers from start to finish, and in particular Party of Your Lifetime is the most addictive bop you will have heard all year.
Warframe invented a fictional nineties boyband, and accidentally made them unbelievably awesome.
Buggy, incomplete, kind of a mess, but absolutely playable if you have a sufficient tolerance for jank.
While it’s for sure a ways away from being the game that was promised, what’s there is still one of the most unique and ambitious gaming experiences you can ever have.
First off, I want you to know that you can customize the game rules, and I’d honestly suggest doing so. I often describe Zomboid as a toolkit for building your own zombie movie. You can change how long it’s been since the “event”, how the infection spreads, how it works, whether survivors have immunity, how long it is before power and water shut off, the spawn chance of different item categories. It’s extremely flexible. Don’t be afraid to treat it as a toolkit. Make the game that’s fun for you.
In terms of actually playing Zomboid, it’s a stealth game first and foremost. You must evade zombies wherever possible. Stay low, avoid noise, avoid lights. Close curtains to about being seen from outside. If there aren’t curtains, make them from bed sheets. Don’t break windows unless you have to (and if you have to, remember to clear off the shards of glass in the frame or you’ll cut yourself climbing through).
If you have to fight, keep moving. You want to string the zombies out then hit a few, then string them out again. But extended fights will kill you as fatigue and panic set in. Remember that if you play by the default rules any scratch from a zombie has a 25% chance to zombify you, any bite is 100%. Zombie virus under default rules is a death sentence. Personally, I turned that off, went with the “Any survivor by now is probably immune” logic.
Your immediate goals are always a good backpack (backpacks reduce the weight of their contents, but that reduction depends on their quality), a good melee weapon, food and bandages. You can make bandages from torn up clothing, and with a pot of water you can boil them to sterilize them. This helps avoid infection.
Longer term, a big goal is to get your skills up. You want books for the big multipliers they give, and watching the right TV shows will give certain skills a huge boost. There are also certain things that you simply cannot do if you haven’t either read about them or started with the right character, like maintaining cars or hooking up generators.
The golden rule of Zomboid is that whenever you find yourself thinking “Surely they didn’t bother putting that in the game,” well, they did. You have to really start thinking about what you would actually do in these situations if it was real life. If you could do something in real life, you can probably do it in the game. If something would be dangerous in real life, it’s probably dangerous in the game. Don’t drink stagnant water without boiling it. Don’t eat food without cooking it. Etc, etc. (Yes, that includes the time my wife tried to make a can of WD40 and a lighter into a flamethrower and immediately exploded). It’s less of a zombie game and more of a survival sim with zombies (seriously, once you get the hang of this game you will spend way too much time thinking about the value of potatoes).
Oh, yeah, it’s use in the crypto space is absolutely part of cult conditioning. Any reality check, any sensible question, any appeal to reason, it’s all FUD. Only blind unquestioning faith in the rapture… I mean TO THE MOON… is acceptable.
FUD means “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.” I’m not following how you think that’s what’s happening here? I mean, I think you’re accusing the Kodokawa execs of bullshitting, but what they’re expressing is the opposite of FUD.
Tribes was an incredible series. I’ve played every game in the series, but I think it really peaked with Tribes 2. That game was basically perfect. The movement, the gunplay, the vehicles, the maps, all of it was spot on.
This just means you’re figuring out what you like, and refusing to force yourself to enjoy trash.
Remember, 90% of anything is shit, and of that 10%, not all of it is going to appeal to your tastes.
On top of that, AAA gaming is a fucking wasteland right now. Publishers have squeezed all the life out of the medium in search of ongoing profit bonanzas. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a AAA game, unless we count Cyberpunk which had the benefit of being self published, so I don’t really think that counts.
Oh, my bad, Elden Ring would definitely count as AAA. That was awesome (still need to finish it, and the DLC). But let’s be real, Elden Ring is great because it’s so different from the vast majority of the open world games out there.
Anyway, I mostly spend my time on mid-shelf, indie and self-published stuff, and even then the number of games I like is pretty small. My main go tos are Darktide, Warframe, Insurgency, Chivalry 2, The Finals (I guess that’s kind of mainstream?), Stellaris, and Total War Warhammer. I’ve also recently enjoyed VA-11-Hall-A, Slay The Princess, Shadows of Doubt, and Space Marine 2. Those were all pretty great.
I like that a lot of games get more long term support now. That’s really cool. It’s fun to be able to keep coming back to a game I like and finding new stuff.
But yeah, you don’t owe it to anyone to enjoy everything, and you owe it to yourself to not waste your time on things you don’t enjoy.
Hey, if they’re actually securing funding for this instead of pushing the cost off onto eager fans, good for them. At least they’re doing one thing right. Unfortunately that only increases the potential for this to turn into a trash fire that sinks their whole company.
It feels like this has disaster written all over it.
Sorry if I’m harshing anyone’s vibe, but I can’t escape the feeling that a group of people whose main involvement in the games industry is as voice talent are basically saying “How hard could it be?” and not understanding that the answer is “Very.”
Ideally they would team up with an experienced studio to build something off of their creative ideas. But if they try to do this whole thing themselves, it has the makings of a Wha Happen? episode all over it.
Maybe it’ll work. They pulled off Vox Machina, so who knows. I’d certainly like to be wrong. But I can’t help but feel like we’ll all be talking about the fallout from this in five years, when eager backers are still waiting for the game they were promised.