always wanted macro management game like county of fortune

instead of micro management that let player place individual statue bill board and convenience store

hope this game work out

New D4 season, so time to work on my RSI

I started Void Marauders.

xcom clone in space.

The plot is literally that you are searching for an artifact that will make you king of the (space) pirates.

---Scritchy Scratchy. It was $5.60 and looked like it might be stoopid fun for a few hours. Then ofc, I never fired it up.
So I now have a game backlog of --- two. I blame Markiplier.

---Borderlands 4 has gone on sale a couple times now, where it's maybe $40-$45 or something. Each time I ponder for 10 seconds then say "nope, not cheap enough yet." Maybe one day it'll be $24.99. That might be low enough.

---7 Days to Die 3.0 went stable. So I'm still messing with it a bit. It's definitely the version I'd use if I really want zombies on because difficulty is so customizable without 400 .xml edits. But on the other hand, it feels a tad less flexible re: such simple, direct .xml file editing. They changed stuff, hardcoded more stuff etc. I still think I like 1.0/b333 (or even A20/A21) better for that. Also, the new "random better stats" on gear is nice. So you might find an early lvl2 Stone Axe or lvl1 Pistol with more damage or more range or less stamina used than a normal version of it. Makes loot hunting initially a tad more interesting.

Mafia - I'm playing the redone original. I finished it before the remake, and I remember enjoying it, but I really don't remember the story at all. It's well done though. The city feels alive and the story is solid. I bought the 3rd game with it as a pack (already owned 2) so I might play that next.

After looking through the screenshots, I've realised that I "finished" (as in, got pretty far and grew tired of bugs) Retro Abyss. A somewhat meta bullet-hell. The "numbers go up" part and the visual design were enjoyable, the story did not quite land for me (the in-game player seems to be a set character) and the writing was somewhat off in terms of phrasing or translation. The main issue is that the game stopped saving the progress between the sessions at some point and the cut-scenes were unskippable.

Decided to let Absinthia be - I really do not like the RPGMaker combat system and the linear story, even if the core party is quite appealing.

Replayed I was a Teenage Exocolonist for the "best" ending and got a few more along the way. It is welcome to see a mostly visual novel that takes the advantage of Unity not being a VN-only engine (i.e. you can run around the maps with the keyboard). It is somewhat less enjoyable when you are going from the start to the end and trying to optimise to hit few very specific things, but it was quite nice to see some mid-game endings and the full character endings.

---

Virtue and a Sledgehammer demo. I liked the aesthetic and the presentation, but destroying robots in a forest felt wrong. One must go for the squishy and, most importantly, not-flameable meatbag that had put the robots there. Which, I assume, was the goal, but unachieveable during the demo. Still, reminded me of Johnny Gat.

Edited Saturday at 07:02 AM2 days by Hawke64

Goal nr. 4/2026 achieved.

July 4, 15:15 – After few breaks in-between playing Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales from GOG, I have finally finished it 3 months after the first launch. It was my first and blind playthrough, which I have finished with unlock of all except two achievements, and which took me about 48 hours to play. I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised, how much I have enjoyed this game, despite it being a deckbuilder, which is a genre, which I usually avoid. The main reason would be tons of choice of consequences, which were sometimes very hard to choose from and the consequences which I choose were sometimes pretty damning. All I can do now, is just hope, that CD Project will one day decide to make at least one more Witcher Tale, because there are very few games with such rich C&C gameplay.

For some reason BL4's sale price went down further, to $35ish. So I bought it simply to see how it runs on my desktop/maybe refund. I'm expecting - not terribly well. CPU might be a bottleneck at anything below 4k, too. Unsure.

But mostly I came here to express annoyance at (DL) size bloat of some AA/AAA games these days. BL4 is 105GB and even with avg. 75MB speed still gonna be 25-30 minutes. Crimson Desert was over 100GB too. It's becoming more normalized vs. occasional outlier. Even with my fidelity nitpicks at times, I'd rather less micropixel texture, tbh, vs. all this space. I remember being "amazed" that FO:NV was 10gb.

In terms of being a gamer, I'm definitely starting to fall into the "ancient retired Warrior/King". It's all too ridiculous.

EDIT: also, can Steam at least increase the refund window to 2.5 hours? Games that may have you and your older rig sitting for 10+ minutes compiling shaders etc eats up that time before you can judge anything beyond "does it start when you click Play."

Edited Saturday at 10:44 PM2 days by LadyCrimson

BL4 - surprisingly it runs mostly ok with a lot of lowered settings. So 4k-DLSS ultra performance, some high, some medium, some low (or off if it lets me, doesn't always). Very clearly CPU bound (cpu 70-90%, GPU - 25%) or something, but stable 60, temps fine, VRAM fine, and clarity still looks decent re: BL funky graphic style. The increased/double jump is fun. The inventory UI/graphics suck (too many things look the same while looking for specific items). There's a new infinite heal item you equip that has a cooldown timer - which I suppose is nice, except I think because of that they also increased enemy hit damage and movement speeds.

Even more interesting, decided to create a Family Share for 1st time ever, so hubby could see if it would run on his desktop. He wasn't expecting it to - but it does. Even starting at 4k, with no DLSS (some kind of Temporal+generic scaling?) all low etc, 30-45fps but didn't notice any bad stutter/terribad frame-pacing. He could lock it at 30 and play (he's not that picky). He's using a Xeon W-2133 and gtx 1660. Could be some busy areas that would still be fps-tankers tho.

No real LAN in BL4 however (so Family Share wouldn't work to co-op, can't both play at same time if Online mode).
With all the jumping and grappling now tho, early on feels less like BL and more like a jumping/platform gameplay. Hubby has the week off so I guess I'm not refunding/we'll see if we like it more after 10 hrs (vs. 2-3).

Edited Sunday at 04:43 AM1 day by LadyCrimson

Finished Mafia Definitive Edition. I wasn't going crazy, they did change the story quite a bit. The ending was pretty good. I'm going to play Mafia 3 next.