What Are you Playing 7: Deadly Sims

[warty goblin]

King's Bounty 2 continues to be an excellent source of enjoyable fantasy nonsense.

Case in point, yesterday I did a quest that involved reassembling the skeleton of an amnesiac talking skull. This revealed that one of my character's ancestors had been an idiot, and the skull belonged to a mildly infamous necromancer. I then fought the necromancer's revived army and destroyed it, which caused the poor undead chap to feel so bad he just wanted to sulk in the swamp for all eternity.

I love stuff like that. KB2 also has the huge advantage of having relatively little combat. That whole quest had a single fight in it, and a lot of quests have none at all. You have to win fights to open up new areas of the map, but there's nothing like the density you see in most RPGs, and once you open up an area, it stays open. This lets fights feel like a change of pace, and something that actually impacts quests and the game world, rather than just throwing some more dudes at you because you haven't killed anything in like 3 minutes and might be getting bored.

[Wookieetank]

So I picked up a Steam Deck and it came in over the weekend. About 1/4 of my library is playable on it without any jiggery pokery on my part, and more importantly, allows me to play my metroidvanians on the go (and with a controller). Maybe I'm weird, but metroidvanians on a keyboard just don't work well for me. Was able to get past where I was stuck in Guacamelee, and then get through a significant portion of the game in one sitting. Spelunky is still kicking my donkey though.

Only downsides to the Steam Deck so far, is the heat vents are on the back, so you have to be careful how you hold it, and it only lasts 2ish hours between charging, even with low end games. Might be able to extend that with turning off/down some of the background of steam features, but haven't had a chance to poke around for sure yet.

[Batcathat]

Yesterday I finally started playing the aforementioned Unavowed and so far it's living up to my rather high expectations. Maaaybe a little bit too easy so far, but that seems likely to increase over time (not to mention that if it wasn't, I would probably complain about it being too hard instead. ).

[Anteros]

So I picked up a Steam Deck and it came in over the weekend. About 1/4 of my library is playable on it without any jiggery pokery on my part, and more importantly, allows me to play my metroidvanians on the go (and with a controller). Maybe I'm weird, but metroidvanians on a keyboard just don't work well for me. Was able to get past where I was stuck in Guacamelee, and then get through a significant portion of the game in one sitting. Spelunky is still kicking my donkey though.

Only downsides to the Steam Deck so far, is the heat vents are on the back, so you have to be careful how you hold it, and it only lasts 2ish hours between charging, even with low end games. Might be able to extend that with turning off/down some of the background of steam features, but haven't had a chance to poke around for sure yet.

Not sure what the benefit is compared to a mid-tier gaming laptop. The fact that it's handheld?

[factotum]

Not sure what the benefit is compared to a mid-tier gaming laptop. The fact that it's handheld?

And has a built-in controller. If you want to use one of those with a gaming laptop you have to carry a separate item and plug it in. Mind you, this kind of sounds like asking "What benefit did a Gameboy offer over a TV plug-in console?", and we obviously know there were enough people who wanted that portability to answer the question!

[Wookieetank]

And has a built-in controller. If you want to use one of those with a gaming laptop you have to carry a separate item and plug it in. Mind you, this kind of sounds like asking "What benefit did a Gameboy offer over a TV plug-in console?", and we obviously know there were enough people who wanted that portability to answer the question!

Pretty much this. And the fact a laptop has to be pretty consistently plugged in once you've had it more than a year, makes it overall less portable.

Seems not downloading a dozen or more games in the background while playing on it significantly improves the battery life (and has it run noticeably cooler as well). Think I put 3ish hours into using it yesterday and still have a little over half the battery left.

Down to 2 areas left in Guacamelee, and am just overall impressed with the game. Between the art style, the music, and the humor, it makes for a very cohesive game. Still at the stage of giving Spelunky dirty looks and the silent treatment though.

[Eldan]

Yesterday I finally started playing the aforementioned Unavowed and so far it's living up to my rather high expectations. Maaaybe a little bit too easy so far, but that seems likely to increase over time (not to mention that if it wasn't, I would probably complain about it being too hard instead. ).

I don't remember it ever being hard, but it does a few clever things. Also with all of the later cases being able to be solved with different party combinations giving you different clues and different ways around problems.

How far along are you?

[Batcathat]

I don't remember it ever being hard, but it does a few clever things. Also with all of the later cases being able to be solved with different party combinations giving you different clues and different ways around problems.

How far along are you?

Probably not very far, since I'm still picking up new party members. My last missions yesterday was making friends with the disgraced detective and the ghost whisperer (so... not far along enough to learn people's names, I guess).

[Anteros]

And has a built-in controller. If you want to use one of those with a gaming laptop you have to carry a separate item and plug it in. Mind you, this kind of sounds like asking "What benefit did a Gameboy offer over a TV plug-in console?", and we obviously know there were enough people who wanted that portability to answer the question!

I very much doubt Gameboy would have been as successful as it was without the exclusive titles.

Portability is indeed nice, but my biggest worry with the steam deck is Valve's history of releasing products and then barely supporting them.

[Wookieetank]

I very much doubt Gameboy would have been as successful as it was without the exclusive titles.

It is wild to think about how the Gameboy was more successful than the Game Gear (Gameboy outsold Game Gear 10:1), despite having lower quality graphics and no back light. Nintendo sure knows what its doing with a handheld.

[Erloas]

Gameboy didn't have to compete with a world of smartphones and the laptops of that era were much larger and much less capable compared to PCs and consoles of that generation.

I think most dedicated portable gaming devices are going to really struggle to justify their existence.

Although at this point phone gaming seems to be stuck in the loop of "no company is making phone games worth paying for" and "we're not going to put a lot of effort into any mobile games because people don't pay for them." So they go down the grinding microtransactions route that mostly ignores actual gameplay.

[warty goblin]

Yeah, the only things I've ever found worth playing on the phone are ports of old PC games. Which then just reminds me I'm playing a perfectly fine game using a touch joystick controller, and boy does that suck.

[WritersBlock]

Well, sadly the sequel to Eternal Senia "Eternal Senia –Hydrangea After The Rain-" is still mobile only, so that is the only way to play that game....

[Anteros]

{Scrubbed}

[GloatingSwine]

Started a new run of Stellaris with Toxoids. Playing Knights of the Toxic God origin.

The start is going brilliantly, I'm Auth/Mil/Spi and the first species I encountered are Auth/Spi/Phi and a Megacorp*, so I jumped straight on a commercial pact with them and I'm leeching off their much larger trade economy to get huge quantities of energy for the early game, and gave me access to colonise all planets at 70% because they're also Lithoids. That's letting me pay the curators so I can super-tech-rush the start and paying for the situation costs. I also rolled the Zroni as my precursor so I've gone into a super early psionic ascension which I'll be getting second stage on soon.

Only problem is that I'm absolutely bleeding consumer goods because I'm top heavy with specialist pops (Duellists, Death Chroniclers, Scientists, etc), and I keep having to top them up on the market. Advancing tech should help that situation and I'm probably going to need to fleet up hard and fast because my other neighbour is a bandit kingdom, and I'm going to have to go and do chivalry to them eventually.


I've also been chewing through the Dawn of War series, going to try and do every game, every faction. Currently on Space Marines in Dark Crusade. The nostalgia is still fun but the pathfinding really does get annoying when you have multiple squads in a control group and they have better ideas about where to stand than where I told them to. (And especially if you have vehicles and squads together, that really messes the pathfinding up).

[warty goblin]

Hit a wall in KB2. All the side quest stuff is gated behind a couple of main quest fights. One of these is merely extremely difficult, I have no idea how to beat the other.

The difficult but probably doable fight is against a real humdinger of an enemy army. A strong cavalry hero unit another punchy regular cavalry stack, two units of weak but mobile birds, and a really annoying full stack of Dwarf flamethrowers, who just wreck face.

The difficulty is that the cavalry units and birds have higher initiatives than my dudes. Between their speed and how much more damage attacking does than counter-attacking, by the time my dudes can move usually my front line is already beat up and stuck in melee, while the birds have zoned my archers.

I think my solution is going to be to switch out all my items for a max leadership build so I can get as many units per stack as possible, swap in melee units for the archers, drop some major debuffs on the Dwarf flamethrowers, and try to stomp the enemy into the mud as fast as possible. An early summon spell may also be useful for a numerical edge.

[Cygnia]

Demo'ed "Slay the Princess" on Steam. Twisted visual novel sort of game -- perfect for this time of year.

[GloatingSwine]

The Knights of the Toxic God continue to be blessed by RNGesus. My first two delves into the Shroud gave me precognitive interface and psi-jump drive, and fleeted up hard enough that my megacorp neighbour was willing to become a protectorate, bashed the bandits the other side and made them a tributary (which immediately turned them into a protectorate because I'm so far ahead in tech, and they're starting to get loyal now). I now have one Scholarium vassal and three protectorates. I'm feeding the bandits science now so I can turn them into a Bulwark once they've got enough to graduate from Protectorate status.

My Lord Preceptor has decided that he, in fact, is the true scion of the Toxic God and declared himself God Emperor as well. Going to decide between trying to expand my vassal count forever or go full imperium.

[Cespenar]

Trying out another two indies as usual -- Foretales turned out to be a pretty enjoyable Hand of Fate-like, if anyone have played that. Minus the 3d fighting bits though, which is a plus. It's basically an adventure/RPG but played with cards.

Northgard, on the other hand, is a RTS similar to the new Dune game, which is like 50% RTS and 50% 4x (or something), which is nice for those of us who don't like going on high APMs. It's Viking-themed, and there's definitely some tabletop "Eurogame" inspirations there, with mechanics similar to worker placement and such. A nice, low-sweat strategy affair, which is refreshing.

Finished up "Chicken Police" and enjoyed it for the most part.

That looks nice, might try it.

[warty goblin]

Trying out another two indies as usual -- Foretales turned out to be a pretty enjoyable Hand of Fate-like, if anyone have played that. Minus the 3d fighting bits though, which is a plus. It's basically an adventure/RPG but played with cards.

I really wish I could get into digital card games, but either I'm bouncing off them, or they bounce off me. Some of it is that they're almost invariably roguelites, and structurally I don't really like roguelites. A pure roguelike is fine, that's just a dungeon crawl with permadeath and randomization, but a roguelite on the one hand basically incentivizes failure, since you need to die to unlock the stuff you need to actually have a shot at success, but on the other penalizes failure with making me redo the same crap again and again.

The other bit is that the style of card game indie card games have settled on is very gamist Mechanics Uber Alles in nature. You set up a borderline broken combo, you do that combo. Then you do the same combo to the next dude. And the next. It's very Pathfinder 2e, just with digital cards instead of a multi attack penalty.

The other other problem is that the first one of these I ever played much of was Erranorth Reborn, which does odd and interesting things with dynamic story/quest generation, has a stupid number of pretty distinct playstyles (coming from somebody who doesn't usually care that much), is oriented much more towards you being some flavor of semi-ordinary fantasy schmuck, and has a huge library of hot fantasy cheesecake vampire babes you can play as. Or elf babes if you prefer, its pretty heterodox in the fantasy babe department.

[Anonymouswizard]

Honestly I can totally see why a card battling game would go roguelite, it's just a natural fit. If you're not going for a big, epic campaign you can lock the player into a specific deck for a run and let them unlock new cards to try out at the end. With short enough runs you don't have to worry about players putting the game down and coming back two weeks later having forgotten their strategy.

On the other hand while the combination just makes sense I can see why it wouldn't appeal to people. I personally don't particularly like roguelikes, but I think I could deal with it in a card battling game. Although if I'm playing a card game I'd much rather have actual cards to handle.

[Cespenar]

The other bit is that the style of card game indie card games have settled on is very gamist Mechanics Uber Alles in nature. You set up a borderline broken combo, you do that combo. Then you do the same combo to the next dude. And the next. It's very Pathfinder 2e, just with digital cards instead of a multi attack penalty.

Foretales is not like that at all, but I get your drift. The "optimization" sub-sub-genre is an iffy one. Games can devolve from "oh cool, nice synergy" to full-OCD in a heartbeat.

[Lord Raziere]

On the other hand while the combination just makes sense I can see why it wouldn't appeal to people. I personally don't particularly like roguelikes, but I think I could deal with it in a card battling game. Although if I'm playing a card game I'd much rather have actual cards to handle.

Yeeeeeeeah, the only roguelite I like is Hades. I just can't get into a game where all my customization options are randomized and thus aren't retained.

[Rynjin]

Yeeeeeeeah, the only roguelite I like is Hades. I just can't get into a game where all my customization options are randomized and thus aren't retained.

A good Roguelite should definitely have some method of retaining customization, and I think most of them are pretty similar to Hades honestly. In Hades you get to:

-Retain increased stat totals
-Choose your weapon/weapon variant

And...that's about it, really. In a lot of card game Roguelikes you get to:

-Choose your character/class/equivalent
-Choose your starting deck

In both cases you get to define your overall playstyle going in but everything else is randomized from there. You don't get to choose outright your God Boons or what cards you add to your deck, which is where a lot of your power comes from.

Only true Roguelikes COMPLETELY sack your progress when you die. The only recent true Roguelike I can remember playing is Noita.

[WritersBlock]

As far as Roguelike's/Roguelite's. The one I have played the most is "The Consuming Shadow" by Yahtzee Croshaw. When you first start it can be quite punishing but you get exp after each playthrough, win or lose. Gain some levels and subsequent playthroughs get more and more fun as you unlock more levels and star benefits. (And unlock extra characters)

[MCerberus]

Octopath showed up on game pass, which is good because my switch cart when missing over a year ago when I barely had the crew together.

And sweet spawn of JJ Abrams did they decide to hide their very good sprite/voxel work behind absurd amounts of post processing.

[warty goblin]

Foretales is not like that at all, but I get your drift. The "optimization" sub-sub-genre is an iffy one. Games can devolve from "oh cool, nice synergy" to full-OCD in a heartbeat.

That's good to know, and bumps Foretales up to actually interesting status.

As far as Roguelike's/Roguelite's. The one I have played the most is "The Consuming Shadow" by Yahtzee Croshaw. When you first start it can be quite punishing but you get exp after each playthrough, win or lose. Gain some levels and subsequent playthroughs get more and more fun as you unlock more levels and star benefits. (And unlock extra characters)

That would be the thing I don't like about roguelites though. I don't mind losing a game, I don't mind particularly if the random elements set up a hard run by chance, and I don't mind starting out weak, but I really dislike being set up to lose. That just means I need to get stomped for like 4 hours before I've paid my noob tax and can actually play the game.

[LibraryOgre]

I need to keep pushing on Wrath of the Righteous. Took a break to beat Aven Colony, again, but seldom have I been less interested in a sandbox for a game, and the central mystery of the campaign is completely superfluous... you're told part of a story at the end of every campaign mission, but you don't actually interact with it at all. "Keep an eye out for suspicious behavior. There will then be zero suspicious behavior you can see, and you have no way of contacting me."

[Anonymouswizard]

That would be the thing I don't like about roguelites though. I don't mind losing a game, I don't mind particularly if the random elements set up a hard run by chance, and I don't mind starting out weak, but I really dislike being set up to lose. That just means I need to get stomped for like 4 hours before I've paid my noob tax and can actually play the game.

Honestly, Roguelikes tend to also have a noob tax in learning to game the systems and when to move to the next area. It's just that you can probably transfer most of it to other Roguelikes.

Honestly, the idea of doing continual runs where you slowly build up resources could be a decent structure outside of the randomised layout genre. The first thing that springs to mind is filling in a map and unlocking shortcuts for later runs (while resetting enemies, items, and bosses), but I'm sure people who spend their time designing games can come up with good 'set map, multiple runs' gameplay loops.


Anyway, I'm back to Shadowrun: Hong Kong again, and I really do think I prefer it to Dragonfall. I went ork again, because they're my favourite metatype, and made a decker because I'm not taking Is0bel along on every mission for the second playthrough in a row. The fact I'm capped at INT 8 rather than 9 shouldn't be too much of a deal, it'll encourage me to dedicate some Karma to meatspace combat.

Although as an ork I'm of course speccing into Strength/Body over Quickness, particularly as I began with a point in Close Combat. Specialising in cyber weapons instead of thwacking sticks or unarmed, because of course the first implant I get is the Molly Millions hand razors. Dermal armour for survivability is probably next on the list, although I'll also need wired Reflexes and cybereyed to go the full Molly. Do cybereyed even increase melee accuracy?

Cyberware+decks+programs means this is going to be one expensive build nuyen-wise. If I can afford it the last purchase will be hydraulic jack legs for the movement boost.

[warty goblin]

Honestly, Roguelikes tend to also have a noob tax in learning to game the systems and when to move to the next area. It's just that you can probably transfer most of it to other Roguelikes.

I don't object to losing because I don't know how to win, because learning to play better is fun. I object to losing because the game hasn't given me the ability to win, because getting my face stomped without the ability to avoid getting stomped is just pointless.

Honestly, the idea of doing continual runs where you slowly build up resources could be a decent structure outside of the randomised layout genre. The first thing that springs to mind is filling in a map and unlocking shortcuts for later runs (while resetting enemies, items, and bosses), but I'm sure people who spend their time designing games can come up with good 'set map, multiple runs' gameplay loops.

This is basically Dark Souls map design.