Never heard of Megalomaniac before, looks like a Donald Trump simulator from the trailer I saw. I considered getting Stardew Valley a few times, but then I remembered I tried Rune Factory once and I just didn’t get into it, so probably the same thing would happen with this game. Mizal however said it’s very relaxing to just focus on farming and accused me of having too much toxic masculinity to properly enjoy such games. Don’t have a real gaming computer so Steam is all a bit useless to me, though I was looking at the sales on the Playstation store and cheaper indy games (Some of which are probably on PC) Not sure if you’ve ever heard of a game called Thea: The Awakening, but I bought that one recently. It’s a weird hybrid of turn based strategy and card driven combat. The overhead map is pretty much the same for those type of games, with building up your village, sending people to explore, fight, gather resources, etc. It can get a little complex since you can focus on crafting new things to equip your people with since each person in your village has their own inventory slots, along with their own stats, skills, etc. Also there are events that can occur that can result in a CYOA style choices. However, the part that made me less enthusiastic for the game was the card driven combat. Basically instead of the usual moving your dudes in a tactical battle map when combat begins, your people are represented by a card and you have to play them in such a manner which will be the most beneficial. The cards are randomized a bit so sometimes your strongest fighters only take a supporting role, unless you reshuffle, and depending on how hard you made the game through the options, you might not get the option to reshuffle, or you have to pay to reshuffle. To make a long story short, the combat plays like a more complex version of Gwent, and if there was anything I actually disliked about Witcher 3, it was that mini-game. I tried to like the game despite this, but it’s just a slog to me. Playing cards to fight just isn’t fun. I would have preferred a combat system more like Age of Wonders. Still, if you are into the whole card driven combat thing and turn based strategy (and doesn’t really have a generic fantasy setting) you might like it.
Lol. I don’t always need a BloodKnight/Rogue path, but I think for a game like Stardew Valley which focusing on building up your farm and such, I’d need a “hardcore” mode where there’s a bit more risk involved. (Weather, dying, NPCs refusing to be cooperative, etc)
Would have been cool to have an actual “aging” process for the town too, so you (And the NPCs) eventually grow old and die and you just continue playing as one of your children instead.
They could even get around the whole complexities of needing another unique NPC for those that die by just doing a generation Xerox thing and their children are exactly like them, or someone new moves into the town and has a similar personality.
And yes, for those of us that must live forever, there could have still been a quest/mission/etc. that allowed you to find an eternal youth fountain or mix up some sort of youth elixir.
But I imagine adding stuff like death would defeat the purpose of the game.
In any case, while on the topic of building sims, going to also suggest Sheltered if you’re into survival type games. I’ve mentioned this one before in the past on here, but I recently started playing it again now that some of bugs got fixed. (a quick glance on Steam it says its currently only $3.74)
Sheltered is basically a more complex, yet smaller scope version of “Fallout Shelter.” It’s a lot more grim than Fallout Shelter.
You create a family of four with a pet and slowly build up your semi-stocked shelter. Naturally you have go out on the surface to gather more supplies.
A lot of the focus is on crafting and gathering things that are generally going to make your family’s life easier in the shelter. But there is a lot to do. Besides the usual food/water/sleep needs, you also got bathroom and hygiene (Yours and the shelters since that can get dirty over time, attracting vermin) to think about.
The shelter also has a generator, water filter, oxygen filter all of which that will eventually deteriorate over time so those need ongoing maintenance The generator needs fuel too, so that’s another concern. Upgrading and expanding your shelter will eventually be necessary.
And that’s all the basic stuff to worry about and it’s definitely not only things. Radiation on the surface when going out, hostile people trying to get into the shelter, food poisoning, your family getting stressed out from various things, etc.
You can accept new people into the shelter, but you have to keep track of their loyalty meter. If its not working out between a recruit and the family, it’s probably better to do your best to try to get that person killed off as opposed to telling them to leave so they don’t break or steal anything on the way out.
The game is also one of the rare newer games that has child death since you start out with two and they can die just like anyone else. In fact you can send your kids on the surface to explore and have them kill other people. (Child soldiers for the win)
Oddly food is a lot harder to get than water since there typically is enough rain going through your filter that you probably won’t die of dehydration as long as you’re not taking showers constantly and being smart with the rationing.
Food on the other hand is either canned (Which you need to either find or trade for) or fresh meat from trapping animals on the surface. The problem though lies with needing a freezer to store meat and those aren’t immediately easy to build since you have to get the parts for one first. You can trap all the mutant animals you want but unless you at least have a freezer you won’t be able to eat them. It's one of the few things I don’t like about the game since I’d say you should at least be able to cook the meat and eat it immediately.
And it wouldn't’t be a post apocalyptic sim if you couldn't just cannibalize your dead if you really need to. Though you have the same problems there too, you need a freezer to store the chunks of long pig in.
Still despite the game’s weird obsession with freezers, I think it’s one of the better attempts at a post apocalyptic survival sim.
Alright, having completed enough of Stardew Valley than is probably healthy, I can say I rate it very highly for its systems design. It has so. many. freaking. things. to do, and yet they're all very simple at their core. The game is marvelously complex, but at the same time extremely accessible. I'd compare it to the free form structure of a Dwarf Fortress, but with a fixed story, and everything's near saccharine levels of niceness (all dialogue options are 'nice,' people become more wholesome as you gain hearts with them - there is no anti-heart/evil path at all). What makes the game excel, is that you're given a free form goal (run a farm), and nothing else.
You're gradually eased into new ways to run that farm and make money, and while everything is extremely simple mechanically, the combination of so many systems means that you're pretty much never bored - until around fifty hours in, and that only lasts a few hours - because you're constantly doing new things or old things in new ways. I went through a fishing phase > a farming phase > an animal rearing + farming phase > a Santa Claus phase (giving gifts to get friendship levels to unlock story content) > to a end dungeon raid phase that was surprisingly fun 70 hours in > to a radical farm re-engineering phase, and at each level, you can still always do the things you did earlier. The game adds on to your mental model very gently, and there are a ton of interactions that are there that you wouldn't have thought off in the first place.
Beyond that, I think I've mentioned earlier about a play that ran near the turn of the century, where the artists had rented a mansion, and characters physically moved throughout the run-time, meeting other characters and having interactions. You as the audience physically followed whichever character you wanted to (or none at all, just stand in one place and see what happens). I really feel like I missed out on an opportunity to see that form of character development and building in action ... until Stardew Valley. Each character has a pre-scripted thing they do every day, and like that play, you'll be able to learn more about the character and their motivations by how they behave, and it's fantastic storytelling that few games have access to, and fewer do well.
On the whole, it's a feel good game, out and out - you have no costs of running the farm whatsoever, being knocked out in a dungeon (the only place you can 'die') is like GTA - you wake up in your bed with less money and lose a few items, and the only 'evaluation' happens near 80 hours in, and if you were taking thing seriously you should have reached max levels everything and have over a million in the bank by then (clearing most of the requirements for the best appraisal). The character development itself is alright, it's not outstanding writing by and far, but by making the characters revolve around what they are (e.g. a writer will hang out at the museum, the town smith closes shop from 4-7 PM to practice his craft, people visit the church on Sunday and there's a lady's aerobics class on Tuesdays) and not just what they say (most/all other games), the game makes for a fascinating example of scripted-emergent storytelling (e.g. you can figure out the true parentage of one of the characters by where they spend their time, somewhere no other characters walk to, except that character's mother). I highly recommend it, and despite me calling it saccharine, the townsfolk have a lot of issues (and they don't all resolve neatly with a bow on top, especially the alcoholics), and with 28 of them, that's a lot of story real estate to mine. I'd highly recommend buying it, it's a unique and rewarding experience, and I understand online co-op will be patched in at a later date, and that'll be a whole other type of an experience.
We already have one. It's just very old and nobody really does anything in it. It's good to know that the members are alive though.
I'm not super sure what it's called, I think it'it's just something generic like "CYS Steam Group" or the like. It's got some semi-active people, like Betaband, Frank, and Negative (I think?) Other than that it's mostly people who I only know are alive because they like Civ games.
Picked up Arma 3 to ease my worse addictions of other things and get involved in the community. surpringly is it's really cool and I made a lot more friends already then I ever did on any other steam game.
Also picked up Company of heros 2, just as a collection to the first one, haven't even touched it yet
Nah, only if you end up joining a clan or something similar would you need to commit, and thats if its hardcore. Theres plenty of casual servers and game modes to just jump on and kill shit and call it a day. Usually just jump on a hunger games or GTA styled map and that's good enough for like a hour if I'm tight in time. Honestly Arma 3 with all the DLC is a reallyyyyyyy big steal for just 25 bucks rather than 70.
I don't plan on playing COH 2 anytime soon, just felt the need to buy it to complete a collection, pretty stupid reason now that I think about it. I'll probably touch that new eastern front mod that just came out for the first game instead
I have acquired Fallout 3 GOTY and New Vegas Ultimate.
I also got the classic 1, 2, and Tactics.
My total was $24.97. That's less than both Fallout 4 and it's season pass.
Life is good.
... No.
Too late, Valve patched that bug a month ago. Now gifting only works within region, so I can't gift to regions where the price is significantly higher than what I bought it for. Additionally, I can only gift directly to an account, I can't buy copies on sale to gift later.
For a comparison of what games cost between regions, checkout Steamdb.info.
Most games used to launch at around 999 INR, but that's spiked to 2000 INR this year, and bigger publishers (2K, Activision Blizzard) maintain price parity with US rates (which leads to a ton of piracy, and seeing how they're charging INR 7000 for Shadow of Mordor's sequel, I wish them all the best in getting sales in India). The alleviate that, by the way, by dropping the MRP over time, the new Doom started at INR 4200, dropped to 3000 after 4 months, dropped to 2000 in June this year (not the price after discount, the price before discount), so now a year after launch I can buy it for 3200 INR less than what it launched for (I still won't, though)
Antarctica is basically populated exclusively by fuckin' nerds.
I ended up getting Fallout 4, Portal ,Portal 2 ,Life is Strange, Turmoil , 7 Days to die, Kindergarten , Left 4 Dead 2 , and Game Dev Tycoon.
If you've seen the clickbait titles about everyone being dead or getting up to some wacky hijinks, then it's pretty much exactly like that: South Park, Children doing things they shouldn't, but with actual, charming adventure game humor rather than celebrities, politics, and religion randomly thrown into a sea of mind-numbing edge. It's a fun, charming bout of puzzling and trial and error until you finish the game and find all the alternate paths.
But there are plenty of better ways to use those hundreds of FO4 hours honestly. Any of the previous fallout games comes to mind.
Personally I prefer the previous fallout games but I do like the ability to establish settlements. What I enjoyed the most about New Vegas is the availability to join more than just the 2 main factions. I felt like Fallout 3s main story line was okay but they could've done more with it. Although the dlcs are pretty good in my opinion.
I do love FO3's DLC. I wish they did more Lovecraftian stuff, but the next two games don't seem nearly burnt or swampy enough to pull it off the same way.
Well, considering New Vegas is in the desert-like Mojave wasteland, within parts of California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, you can't really expect it to be swampy. Unless you count the fog-like clouds of death in the Sierra Madre as swampy.
The Divide was pretty burnt, imo.
Actually, the Sierra Madre would've worked as amother different kind of Lovecraft-lite setting if they added that kind of bent to it instead of a heist movie thing, but they only had room for one gimmick, seeing as they already made a whole fucking new area to piss around in. Besides it was fine as a haunted casino anyway.