melkathi

Sorry, I already own it.

Started Iron Harvest. I am not very good at RTS games anymore. I don't think I ever was great, but I feel I am getting a bit too old for the genre. Still, I play it for the steampunk story. I do wonder how good/bad the native speaker voice acting is. I am in the Polania campaign so can't judge, as I don't speak Polish. The Saxony campaign comes later, so haven't checked the German.

Actually, if the pandemic showed anything it is that countries' cannibalization of their public healthcare in favour of privatization and tax cuts for big business was criminal in how unprepared it left them for the pandemic. Also how narrow minded and selfish most of the rich countries acted. But aren't you getting tired of trying to turn every single one of your posts into lashing out at the evil left?

It should. Moving is very rewarding. Yes, it is a lot of work setting everything up, but you can do things differently, do them from a point of experience of how you ended up wanting them. So you can do a few things right, which in the previous home would have been too much of a hassle to change.

I didn't go to a Christmas party because I didn't trust everyone invited when it comes to health and safety. People felt I was being unreasonable and strange as I tend to be. I noticed that the people I talked to since then were oddly evasive and didn't even mention the party. Today a friend called and in the course of the chat asked me if I heard who just had a positive test result a few days ago... I am not happy a friend is ill. But it explains a lot why everyone has been acting so funny. They are trying to avoid the "I told you so". As if I were going to "I told you so" when a friend is ill. I did learn though that just the knowledge that someone has the high ground to say it, makes people wince more than the actual words

My list of finished games is short. I'll do a Good, Bad, Ugly list (not all games released 2021) : The Bad 2021: Evil Genius 2 was the worst offender. My greatest disappointment in any game. Especially as the marketing people flat out lied and described the game as being the opposite of what they said. I had a positive opinion of Rebellion as they had been decent in the past, but EG2 burned any and all goodwill I had towards them and put them on my no-purchase list. Vampire: The Masquerade - Night Road I gave up on after 13 minutes. I seriously disliked the writing. A game that is pure text should convince with the text. Conglomerate 451 tries too hard to be 1337. The devs try to do some damage control on the forum by acknowledging that their design direction has alienated a LOT of customers (read: no Save & Quit during missions because a true rogue like has consequences...) Necromunda: Underhive Wars I already disliked last year, but I was going to be the bigger teddy bear and give it another another chance and see how all the hard work the devs put into the game improved things. Bolters now drop as loot, which had previously been left out of the loot table. Yay... a year worth of patches and it is the only significant change to be honest. Rock and Rogue a Boo Bunny Plague Adventure is bad even for a game which you walk into fully expecting a yanky one man project with problematic gameplay. The original Boo Bunny Plague was hilarious and made up for any hiccups while playing. The Meh 2021: Rogue Lords is a rogue like where you play the devil and use your essence (HP) to affect things in the game. Sometimes the gimmick works well, such as when you walk into a boss fight but have a terror effect that let's you use the devil ability for free once, and so you reduce the health of the boss to 1 for free - it cheapens the fight, but you are the devil so it is very thematic and a highlight of the game experience. Often it is just a thing you do. The biggest problem is the insane damage that you just can't block. All rogue likes have inherent balance issues and sometimes your team will get an encounter they just can't beat. But usually all encounters would be beatable with the right team. In Rogue Lords some encounters just aren't winable ever with any team. Meh. Encased is throwing too many survival mechanics at the player, making the game too tedious for me to play. I understand other people will enjoy it and overlook some faults, but while the atmosphere is great, I can't find the energy to endure the gameplay. Probably because just like in Encased, I'd have to sleep for a year to regenerate the energy to play the game. Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York tried hard to be better than Coteries. And it falls short. While in theory we get two endings now, the writer should have spend less time congratulating themselves on how awesome they are and more time making the writing matter. Cat Quest is super cute. It also basically is one internet cat meme done over and over and over and over and over again. I don't regret the two hours I played, but I do have to admit that I repeated the same 5 minutes 60 times in those two hours. And they made a second game... Wildermyth starts interesting and has a good concept. It gets very repetitive very quick though and the random events are too repetitive, not written well enough, and in the end just add skip skip skip tedium. I ended up caring less and less about the characters in my party. Humankind is your standard Amplitude 4X game. LOADS of interesting ideas. But I find the game could do without the gameplay and just let me create my civilization through a questionnaire. The Good 2021 Age of Wonders: Planetfall remains one of my better experiences this year. The empire mode in the last DLC made the game enjoyable in a way the badly written campaigns couldn't. Empire mode is a reason to play the game. The content before the Star Kings DLC was a reason not to. Trials of Fire is a rogue like that does not have your party on the left of the screen facing the enemies on the right. Instead you are markers on hexagonal map tiles; deployed on the left of the screen while your opponents are deployed on the right... The characters have interesting abilities and the loot is rpg fun. Star Renegades is fantastic in the standard good guys on the left, bad guys on the right rogue like genre. Amazing pixel art. It has a premise that works well to make you repeat the loop. It has terrible writing by people who think they are funny. It has an involved way to unlock more characters. The WTF? 2021 How the heck did I end up playing 200+ hours of Skyrim? The reason I stopped was not being able to decide who to marry so the girls could have a second parent. The Highlight 2021 Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children completed its current content recently and except for the one story and one optional crabmit maps (which, if modded out of the game would be great) continues with the same of everything that made the game great so far.

Started a new character for Kingmaker. Went into the spider cave. In the time it took Linzi to toss an alchemist's fire at the spider swarm, it had managed to bite half the party and reduce the strength of both front row fighters. Decided it just isn't worth going through this for maybe a hundred hours or what this game requires. Uninstalled.

So far 2022 has been quiet. I don't trust it.

I can't find anything in the options to turn them off. I only have the "remove on rest" thing, but that only removes a single stack of each.

I remember you were quite excited about this when it was first announced. Is it living up to your expectations?

Well, Kingmaker sure feels as if I was playing a teenager's D&D campaign... Resting is pretty much as stupid as in Encased. While healing with it is good, the stat decrease spam from many opponents early on in the game makes it so you need to rest multiple days in a row just to be able to get back in the fight. The starting party is also basically crap. Devs want to make a game that is just a standard D&D campaign, but then they want you to have useless characters in the party so they can break the mold.

I started pathfinder kingmaker. Not convinced, but due to too many AD&D campaigns in my teens, I will soldier through it for now

The other song you "need" to know is Ma Baker

Americans...

I think you'd be surprised how many people on this forum know Boney M. At least ra ra Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen should be familiar to most.

Of course Steelrising could be promising. I know some people here are bound to play it just for it being a Spiders game. Which is a good enough reason really, considering there are people who play Larian games for being Larian games

Brucie, you sounded a bit like that ABBA song there, Take A Chance On Me Not looking forward to anything in gaming really. Found most games too disappointing. I'll have a look at that Dune strategy game when it comes out naturally. But other than that I'm hard pressed to think of anything that could be in the works. Maybe Midnight Suns.

I could cover all my living expenses for so many years with that...

I uninstalled Encased. After a very positive first impression, I can't seem to find the energy to bother with a game, where devs try to throw roadblocks into player enjoyment. The abysmal heal on rest is a terrible design decision. Especially as the main story will force the player to get damaged at times. Add the bad luck of getting crit hit by an opponent at one point or the other, and suddenly players end up playing the game at the brink of death, because the game doesn't let them heal. Of course you could just rest for a week with breaks for eating and drinking. Drinking you can do from the toilet too, for free. But that means the rest system doesn't work. If in other games I'd sleep 8 hours and continue playing, but here I have to sleep 80, all I will end up doing is sleeping 80 hours. Might as well have let me be done with 8. And of course nothing has been added to my game experience. At least nothing positive. Not that this dev attitude is unique to Encased. Camping supplies in Pillars of Eternity were just as stupid an idea. Dragon random encounters in Skyrim were even worse. In Skyrim I ended up hitting the console, clicking on opponents and typing "kill". It made the game more bearable by a thousand fold. Even though I already had toggled godmode to be able to ignore the encumbrance system. Devs should really be forced to start actually playing games. Possibly even their own.

You remember correctly.

I figured it was a character limit thing and also that you could just give that name to a moogle.

Meanwhile... Shiva: "I got beaten up by a character called Beefstik. Beefstik! That's it. I am going back to FF. They may have literally objectified me by turning me into materia, but at least nobody called Beefstik beat me up. Doesn't even spell the name with a C..."

It 100% follows the book with the addition of a side quest and new character. Just that you only get Tungdil's point of view, so some characters and events may appear a bit sudden to players unfamiliar with the source material. The game isn't extremely long, so by the time you are done with the gimmick of horde combat, it may be over anyway. The book is Heitz's best book in my opinion, though it already has the issue of certain characters being too powerful. This becomes worse in later books in the setting.

I am probably going to give up on Encased. I find the extreme scarcity of healing adds nothing but frustration to the game.