Vidya Games Thread

[Todd's Strongest Howard]

Shadowrun: Dragonfall (Directors Cut) and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Skip Returns, it's only okay but if you finish those two and want more you can also get Returns as a UGC import into Dragonfall for a better experience.
Torment: Tides of Numenera
Any Spiderweb software games.
I've heard good things about Weird West but I've not played it myself yet so I can't 100% recommend it might be up your alley.

I've gone through the HBS Shadowrun games already, pretty much agree with the assessment. I wish the titles took off more with mod/user campaigns but alas, the player base can't save every game. Torment and Weird West are both already in my wishlist though, Torment has been for years now at this point. Didn't think I've heard of Spiderweb software but I've got Avernum 3 for... some reason out of everything, probably some random game from a Humble Bundle at some point or something.

 

[UberSoldat]

Anyone got some good recs for FPS games? I've been having an itch for some new shooting game lately and don't really know of anything outside of COD shit which I'm not interested in that I don't already have. Not really looking for anything multiplayer centric, also not looking for anything that's more of a boomer shooter. Tactical is fine, open world-ish is fine. I already have all the numbered Far Cry games, Ready or Not, Bioshock, Crysis, Metro, Stalker, Tarkov, Doom, Titanfall 2, Sniper Elite, The Division, Prey and a number of other first/third person shooters and MP (Squad, Insurgency, Hunt, etc), so it's understandable I feel I've pretty much tapped most of what's worth playing. Only 'major' series I don't have any part of is the Wolfenstein series, so looking for opinions if it's decent or not along with anything else that might be a lesser known title.

System Shock, Deus Ex 1, Master Chief Collection. As for Wolfenstein, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, New Order, and Old Blood are my go-to picks.

1. Strategy RTS, TBT, Colonybuilders (Civ, CK, JA3, SupCom, AoE, Total War, Rimworld, DF)
2. (S)RPG (Dark Arisen, TES#, isometric cRPGs, Disgaea/NIS, SMT/Persona)
3. zombie shit (Dead Island, Dying Light, B4B, Dead Rising, State of Decay, Zomboid)
4. Metroidvanias (Bloodstained, Chasm, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, MMZ/X)

1. Dawn of War 1 and 2, every Command and Conquer except 4, Empire At War, OpenTTD for citybuilding
2. Planescape, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, I heard good things about Rogue Trader and the Pathfinder games too
3. No More Room in Hell (basically L4D but with way more mechanics) is fun with friends
4. Axiom Verge is decent, Salt and Sanctuary if you're into Souls

The System Shock remake any good, do you know? Otherwise aside from Wolfenstein, the rest are old news. I'm an old piece of shit, I was into PC games since '94 and owned nearly every home console since NES.

Since you're into old PC games, the remake should be right up your alley, if you can tolerate some of its "oldschool-ness."

 

[Todd's Strongest Howard]

System Shock, Deus Ex 1, Master Chief Collection. As for Wolfenstein, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, New Order, and Old Blood are my go-to picks.

1. Dawn of War 1 and 2, every Command and Conquer except 4, Empire At War, OpenTTD for citybuilding
2. Planescape, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, I heard good things about Rogue Trader and the Pathfinder games too
3. No More Room in Hell (basically L4D but with way more mechanics) is fun with friends
4. Axiom Verge is decent, Salt and Sanctuary if you're into Souls

The System Shock remake any good, do you know? Otherwise aside from Wolfenstein, the rest are old news. I'm an old piece of shit, I was into PC games since '94 and owned nearly every home console since NES.

1. Got 'em all.
2. Rogue Trader's got to wait, I'm not shelling out $65 for it right now. Otherwise those are all covered, Wrath of the Righteous is pretty good and the roguelike mode from the first set of DLC is a good time killer, reminds me there's a second set coming out, I might grab the second season pass if it all looks good when it's all out, right now the "DLC 6" isn't released yet.
3. 1349 games in my Steam library and the only thing anyone I know wants to play is FFXIV, Lethal Company, Among Us or League of Legends. This is why I pretty much avoid anything heavily MP based.
4. Apparently I set both these games to 'ignored', they must have come up in a discovery queue at some point and I just clicked through because they didn't sell me instantly. I'll wishlist them at least to keep track.

 

[Abomination]

Also looking for any other suggestions if you've got something you want to shill, preferably <$20, that would fall under;

1. Strategy RTS, TBT, Colonybuilders (Civ, CK, JA3, SupCom, AoE, Total War, Rimworld, DF)
2. (S)RPG (Dark Arisen, TES#, isometric cRPGs, Disgaea/NIS, SMT/Persona)
3. zombie shit (Dead Island, Dying Light, B4B, Dead Rising, State of Decay, Zomboid)
4. Metroidvanias (Bloodstained, Chasm, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, MMZ/X)

I have 1251 games in my steam account so fair chance if you recommend something that is mainstream or even top list of featured or top sellers I probably own it if it's in one of these genres. Only things I don't really care about are sports games or deckbuilders.

1. If you like 4X games like Civ, I really enjoy Endless Space 2 and Age of Wonders 3, Planetfall, and 4, if you haven'tplayed them. 4 isn't cheap right now. 3 is a bit older, but I still enjoyed it when I played it earlier this year. Currently going through Planetfall now, and it fun. ES2 has been one of my favorites in the genre.
2. Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children is one of my favorite SRPGs in a very long time. It can be pretty scuffed since it's made by a small Korean team, but you can tell it's a labor of love.
3. Can't really help here. I like Killing Floor 2, but I'm sure you know it
4. Recently played Ender Lilies, and it was fun. Not as good as Blasphemous, and I had issues with it, but I liked it for the most part.

Spoiler: Tropico Series

You can't go wrong with the Tropico series for city builders. I only played Tropico 4 and Tropico 6 as those are supposedly the best in the series (4 is supposedly better than 6 but very dated graphically)
Shill Pitch:
Imagine a citybuilder but you're a tropical nation during the Cold War (potentially earlier) and you have to build an economy while balancing food, food diversity, cash crops, and then you have industrial processing like "Canned Fruits" or a cigar factory to turn tobacco cash crops into cigars. There's varying prices you have to track and you have to navigate a political system with factions. Factions can do uprisings, you can run secret police, you can abduct people, all sorts of fun stuff.

Tropico 6 is under 20 and Tropico 4 is under 10.

Tropico 4 and 6 are great. Was just playing 6 a few months ago and had a lot of fun with it. I'm usually not great with city builders like Cities Skylines because I lack creativity to make nice looking cities, but Tropico is a bit easier to deal with. It doesn't feel as punishing if you don't make things completely optimal, but it's something you'd definitely like to strive for. Plus, the setting and concept is pretty fun.

---

One game I'd like to shill is one I've been playing a lot of and easily my game of the year: Against the Storm.

A mix of city builder and roguelike sounds strange at first, but the game does it very well. The goal is to start a settlement and build it up to sustain itself, then moving on the to the next one. You get rewards for completing them that you can use to buy upgrades and experience to level up and unlock new building. After a certain amount of years pass, a storm comes through to wipe your settlements and change the map. While building settlements, you are given the option to choose between a few different buildings as you progress, making each run different from the last. And depending how you play and the choices you make, each settlement can take you from and hour to a few hours.

My description probably isn't very good or does the game justice, so I'd recommend looking into it if it sounds interesting. It recently had it's official release, but even in early access, it was great. Like I said, it's definitely my game of the year.

 

[Todd's Strongest Howard]

1. If you like 4X games like Civ, I really enjoy Endless Space 2 and Age of Wonders 3, Planetfall, and 4, if you haven'tplayed them. 4 isn't cheap right now. 3 is a bit older, but I still enjoyed it when I played it earlier this year. Currently going through Planetfall now, and it fun. ES2 has been one of my favorites in the genre.
2. Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children is one of my favorite SRPGs in a very long time. It can be pretty scuffed since it's made by a small Korean team, but you can tell it's a labor of love.
3. Can't really help here. I like Killing Floor 2, but I'm sure you know it
4. Recently played Ender Lilies, and it was fun. Not as good as Blasphemous, and I had issues with it, but I liked it for the most part.

Tropico 4 and 6 are great. Was just playing 6 a few months ago and had a lot of fun with it. I'm usually not great with city builders like Cities Skylines because I lack creativity to make nice looking cities, but Tropico is a bit easier to deal with. It doesn't feel as punishing if you don't make things completely optimal, but it's something you'd definitely like to strive for. Plus, the setting and concept is pretty fun.

---

One game I'd like to shill is one I've been playing a lot of and easily my game of the year: Against the Storm.

A mix of city builder and roguelike sounds strange at first, but the game does it very well. The goal is to start a settlement and build it up to sustain itself, then moving on the to the next one. You get rewards for completing them that you can use to buy upgrades and experience to level up and unlock new building. After a certain amount of years pass, a storm comes through to wipe your settlements and change the map. While building settlements, you are given the option to choose between a few different buildings as you progress, making each run different from the last. And depending how you play and the choices you make, each settlement can take you from and hour to a few hours.

My description probably isn't very good or does the game justice, so I'd recommend looking into it if it sounds interesting. It recently had it's official release, but even in early access, it was great. Like I said, it's definitely my game of the year.

You know, I've played Endless Space and enjoyed it, I also have ES2, but for some reason I've never gotten around to it. Aside from Troubleshooter, I've heard of the rest. Against the Storm's been on my wishlist for a bit too, looks interesting, and your description kind of makes me think of Rise to Ruins, though not quite. That game's also a city builder type of game where you're some kind of god leading people rebuilding against a spreading corruption. You defend your towns from corruption with tower defense like buildings and can push back corruption with fire and light but unless you're extremely fast, the corruption in every map can spread way out of realistic possibility to contain. I think the dev at some point did say that while it's technically possible to entirely expunge the corruption, it's certainly not designed to be the main point. Rather than losing settlements to area wipes though, if you have successfully developed a region you can then queue up people and resources to deliver to new areas to settle a new spot/reinforce. There's also global bonuses to earn from hitting particular development checkpoints in areas, so growing the civilization makes you more powerful as the corruption also gets stronger.

Very neat game. Hard as shit. Loss is frequent. You've got to learn how to establish your resource collection and defenses at top speed without bottlenecking yourself to death because each map isn't terribly large to begin with and the longer corruption lasts in a map the further the territory it spreads over and the AI doesn't need resources to build it's mob spawners, just space. You're almost never going to get the ability to fully purge the corruption, so attacks are always going to be a possibility.

 

[Stunned But Dumb]

Dragon Quest Tact global version to end service on February 29, 2024

The global version of free-to-play strategy RPG Dragon Quest Tact will end service on February 29, 2024 at 12:00 a.m. PT / 3:00 a.m. ET, publisher Square Enix and developer Aiming announced.

www.gematsu.com

Another gacha game gets shut down. Not very notable since this happens every other week, no? Quick reminder, this is the game that Yuji Naka went to jail for with "no regrets."

I don't even hate him, I just am imagining his face if and when he reads about this and... lol

 

[Todd's Strongest Howard]

Spoiler: Boy this Vampire Survivors update is... uh...

 

[Stunned But Dumb]

Spoiler: Boy this Vampire Survivors update is... uh...

Amongus?

 

[Todd's Strongest Howard]

Amongus?

Yeah, the new DLC is Among Us themed which, ugh, but one of the new items instead of being a weapon that does damage, periodically gives you minor stat buff that stack infinitely for the remainder of the run. Problem is, it's own recast time is subject to cooldown reduction, so it's possible that if you get it early enough and get the right rolls, it can random enough CDR that it starts pumping out stat buffs at a high speed which leads to things like depicted, where the Ophion weapon completely swamps the screen in black miasma.

 

[MrProcessor]

Anything notable in the Steam sale? I haven't been good about following those for the past few years.

I still haven't made a decision whether to buy these or not, they've been sitting in my cart a few days now.

The System Shock remake any good, do you know? Otherwise aside from Wolfenstein, the rest are old news.

I like it a lot, it's by Nightdive and they normally do good work. I haven't beaten it yet though.

 

[Tubedude]

I still haven't made a decision whether to buy these or not, they've been sitting in my cart a few days now.

For GalCiv 3, I can chime in.

A few questions, did you play GalCiv 2, and if you did how much did you enjoy it?
As a big fan of GalCiv 2, GC3 felt like a step down in a lot of respects, even after all the DLC's and updates, but it is serviceable. Furthermore, I didn't look into the modding scene so there might be some amazing mods out there for GC3.

Do you like huge maps with lots of planets and factions, or smaller maps?
If you like larger maps/going as big as possible you will NEED 32 GB of RAM or more. The game loves to eat RAM on the larger map sizes, and I think it still has a memory leak somewhere to this day. Smaller map sizes are fine.

 

[MrProcessor]

For GalCiv 3, I can chime in.

A few questions, did you play GalCiv 2, and if you did how much did you enjoy it?
As a big fan of GalCiv 2, GC3 felt like a step down in a lot of respects, even after all the DLC's and updates, but it is serviceable. Furthermore, I didn't look into the modding scene so there might be some amazing mods out there for GC3.

Do you like huge maps with lots of planets and factions, or smaller maps?
If you like larger maps/going as big as possible you will NEED 32 GB of RAM or more. The game loves to eat RAM on the larger map sizes, and I think it still has a memory leak somewhere to this day. Smaller map sizes are fine.

Thanks for the information. I have Galactic Civilizations II, but I've only had a chance to play it a little bit. I think I was mainly looking at getting 3 because it was cheap, but based on your advice I'll probably hold off since I was indecisive about it already and I can play Galactic Civilizations 2 for now. As to the amount of RAM, I think that means I can't play it on my laptop, but my Desktop should be good enough.

Of course, this week I've been spending a lot of time watching an Australian Rat play Yakuza 0, instead of going through my backlog like I should.

 

[killinganother]

Anything notable in the Steam sale? I haven't been good about following those for the past few years.

Most Battlefield games are under 4 usd if you like those kind of games. If you're into shoot'em ups Zero Ranger, Hyper Demon and Drainus are pretty good, and also Enter the Gungeon if you are more into roguelikes. Boomerang X is a pretty cool fps game. Tunic, Anodyne 1 and the sequel are adventure games akin to link to the past that are very decent. If you like metroidvania games Rabi-Ribi, Ender Lilies and Lost Epic are nice picks. Some games i've been recently into that are on sale are Trepang2 (fps similar to F.E.A.R), Lunacid (King's Field throwback, maybe a bit too easy but the atmosphere is excellent) and Void Stranger (seemingly endless sokoban-type puzzle game filled with secrets)

 

[UberSoldat]

Gonna start pumping some life into this thread with content covered in the retro shooter thread from homeland since those are my thing as well. Expect Civvie videos too, while we're at it, why not Mandalore too?

 

[MrProcessor]

Rat Unlock Mad Dog Style, becomes Mad Rat

Lion starts playing with Puppets...

 

[UberSoldat]

While I've stopped watching his reviews for new games, I still like these ones

 

[Zizara]

At the Steam Awards 2023; Starfield has won the award for "Most Innovative Gameplay", Red Dead Redemption 2 has won "Labour of Love" despite not having been updated in years, and The Last of Us 1 has won "Best Soundtrack" despite being a fucking 10 year old game.

...sometimes, jokes write themselves.

 

[Superduper Samurai]

At the Steam Awards 2023; Starfield has won the award for "Most Innovative Gameplay", Red Dead Redemption 2 has won "Labour of Love" despite not having been updated in years, and The Last of Us 1 has won "Best Soundtrack" despite being a fucking 10 year old game.

...sometimes, jokes write themselves.

wdym, RDR2 has constant online updates to sell you microtransactions and lets randy hackers do RCEs on you thanks to Rockstar's spaghetti internet, it deserves all the love

 

[MrProcessor]

At the Steam Awards 2023; Starfield has won the award for "Most Innovative Gameplay", Red Dead Redemption 2 has won "Labour of Love" despite not having been updated in years, and The Last of Us 1 has won "Best Soundtrack" despite being a fucking 10 year old game.

...sometimes, jokes write themselves.

Yeah, I don't think I'll bother voting in them next year. The results this year were just pretty depressing.

 

[UberSoldat]

Slipgate Ironworks, developers of the Rise of the Triad remake, Bombshell, the Kingpin remaster, Wrath, Graven, Phantom Fury, Core Decay, and co-developer of Tempest Rising, has been hit with another round of layoffs

a