The Round Stable

I'm not gonna get it for ages because 59.99 is a really ludicrous price

i play games years after their release.

DaikatunaRevengeance wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 02, 2021 4:56 pm

i play games years after their release.

Me too. I get them for $15 or less like 2+ years after release when they go on Steam sale.

Once I was very lucky to grab The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion a week after release for 10€ at the flea market.
The seller was hugely disappointed by the game and wanted to make someone happy.
Otherwise I also follow the path of the scavenging game collector: Buy cheap when it has become unpopular.

I played Psychonauts 2 at launch because I subscribed to Xbox Game Pass for a month, and they had a special for me to sign up where I only pay $1 for that first month.

$60 spent on a game out of the blue is a bit too much for my blood atm when I'm already saving up for Metroid Dread, but $1 (or even just $10, which is the monthly cost for game pass for PC) is good enough for me to give it a shot

I did buy Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw this year on a sale and the game is a year or two old. So that's the newest one I got. I forgot how much, but it was within my budget.

I bought No Man's Sky just a few weeks ago. That's about five years old, though the game has had a lot of additional content and revisions since then, enough to where it's hard to call it old.

Note that I actually haven't played it yet.

I bought Sprint Vector half a year ago, in a sale. I heard that their VR locomotion system was not bad and not vomit-inducing.
Oh boy... I'm very resilient to simulator sickness (I tortured myself with various self-programmed ways) but it did not take very long to get sick and tired of the game. You move forward by swinging the arms back and forth as you would skiing. There is so much shit going on and so many jumps and speed pads. Every element on it own could be OK but all combined with the huge physical exhaustion makes my head dizzy.

Soon after I bought Yakuza Zero. This one I played for about 4 hours. I'm not a fan of the story and the fighting system. The game is not bad but I could not connect with it.

Fizzbuzz wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 07, 2021 8:54 am

I bought No Man's Sky just a few weeks ago. That's about five years old, though the game has had a lot of additional content and revisions since then, enough to where it's hard to call it old.

Note that I actually haven't played it yet.

it's pretty good now. Definitely treat it as a sandbox game and not a purpose-driven game and you'll have more fun

Yeah, I watched someone stream it and it very much was that Minecraft style do whatever you like kind of thing.

If I can afford a VR set someday, I think No Man's Sky would be fun with it. Part of me would want to play Elite: Dangerous with such a setup as well, but as I understand it, the nice thing about No Man's Sky (and other titles, I'm sure) is that there's an actual game surrounding the spaceflight.

I've heard ED is pretty cool in VR. Especially the Asp Explorer because of its big clear cockpit.

But yeah, it is a game about flying a space ship, but there's not much else.

Surviving Mars just dropped some DLC giving more places to build (underground caves, and on asteroids as they pass by).

but have we survived mars

We have not, as my LP is still on hiatus.

Gimme a chance to test the new mechanics though.

Not from the Pale Red Dot-verse, but here's a new entertainment building, the Amphitheater (left).



Here, colonists can gather to sing, slam poetry, and spout their crazy conspiracy theories.

and spout their crazy conspiracy theories.

earth isn't real

It's very cool that Deathloop turns on the Dark Souls invasion system before giving me the ability to hang on to weapons between loops.

And to get that ability, I have to fend off an invasion, where another player is sent to kill me with a railgun and poison grenades.

And if I skip time to get to that part of the game, like the game tells me to, I have to fight off that player with a machete.

So I go from methodically shanking masked goons from the shadows to playing Tribes with a wiffle bat.



(you can turn that mode off, but the game doesn't tell you how)

I've been thinking about Stardew Valley 'cause i haven't touched it in a long while.

And ultimately the reason why is i don't think i like it. It's a game described as some chill farming game, but my experience with it has been stressful and often frustrating. Sometimes i got the impression that farming was a small aspect of the game, with more focus being on doing side stuff, meeting the locals, befriending them, memorizing when store owners are in their stores, fixing up the community center, taking part in festivals, gathering materials for crafting...
I think there's also some mine you fight monsters in that i didn't even bother with, but apparently you need to to get materials.

it's too much, i just wanted to run a farm.

It's a game that gives you a lot to do, but there's very little you HAVE to do. If you want to just farm then you can, and you can use the money from farming to buy the other stuff you want like metals from the blacksmith. There's a lot of activities you'd leave undone but if you're really not interested in doing those things then you can just ignore them. If you want to play the antisocial farmer person then AFAIK the game isn't stopping you.

At the same time there's a really strong pull to do all of these things because the game wants to make sure you know about everything and also because we are gamers and compulsive thing-doers. Some take it too seriously. The SA thread seems full of minmaxers striving to get the most $$$ possible from each square. And I can't get with that approach, it sounds too much like work. Although I appreciate the irony of your character quitting their stressful repetitive job in order to move to a farm and turn that into their stressful repetitive job.

Have you played Sakuna: Rice and Ruin? It's supposed to have a really robust farming system (rice only, but very in depth).

I dunno, i'm not like min-maxy, i played it normally and just got tired of it wanting me do everything. I mean, it doesn't help it's some matter of RPG. I remember having to suffer through lack of inventory space before i could make a chest to store stuff in (or buy a backpack), so clearing the farm was a pain. There was a lot of these little things that just got in the way.

I've watched some of Ina's streams of Sakuna, but I haven't played it myself. It seems neat

Friends of mine just released a game on Itch.io. They released it for free for the first day of release in order to gain traffic.
After that it'll cost about $4.





https://hastilyassembled.itch.io/zombie-admin

It's a twin-stick shooter with randomised levels in which you have to clear tasks and blast your way through zombies.
The game has also local coop.

DaikatunaRevengeance wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 30, 2021 3:45 am

I dunno, i'm not like min-maxy, i played it normally and just got tired of it wanting me do everything. I mean, it doesn't help it's some matter of RPG. I remember having to suffer through lack of inventory space before i could make a chest to store stuff in (or buy a backpack), so clearing the farm was a pain. There was a lot of these little things that just got in the way.

Stardew Valley might not be quite what you're looking for overall. It's very much a spiritual successor to the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, which used farming as a backdrop for a nonviolent RPG that played out over time. I remember how much you enjoyed Farming Simulator, by contrast, which very much revolves all around farming.

I will probably give it anothe try at some later date, but it seems to be turning out to be that, yeah.

I think what's kept me away from Stardew was that everything's on a timer. All the long-term goals give you, at most, a season to complete all of their requirements or you're stuck putting them on hold until the next year. And I'd been told that some of them only give you two years before they're failed permanently. Very few games put the player under that much pressure non-stop, although I guess it's a pretty common thing in management sims.

On a related note, I've discovered that I really like Slime Rancher, and I'm not sure why. There's a management sim that's proper chill, if a bit shallow. Also props to the devs for creating the first management sim that's also a 3D metroidvania.

Pocket wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 30, 2021 6:27 pm

I think what's kept me away from Stardew was that everything's on a timer. All the long-term goals give you, at most, a season to complete all of their requirements or you're stuck putting them on hold until the next year. And I'd been told that some of them only give you two years before they're failed permanently. Very few games put the player under that much pressure non-stop, although I guess it's a pretty common thing in management sims.

It's after two years that the ghost of your dead grandpa comes back to evaluate how you did, but one of the first post-release patches made it so that you can call him back again so that you're not locked out of the prize from the best evaluation. Aside from that, I don't know off the top of my head of anything that's permanently missable, unless you choose to sell the town out to the totally-not-Amazon evil megacorp.

I think it's an interesting question to ask what games out there simulate farming in a reasonably in-depth way aside from Farming Simulator?

Sakuna, maybe?

Allegedly the website belonging to Japan's ministry of agriculture became unusable from so many people looking up how to farm rice.

Also, agreed, Slime Rancher owns.

I created a game jam game for the currently occurring game jam "Ludum Dare".
In my game you are a unicycle and stuff falls on you that try to get you out of balance.
The objective is to survive the barrage of objects as long as you can.
It is a very simple game but I hope it's fun enough to kill some time.

Game Jam page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/ ... -balancing
Download page: https://adiwan.itch.io/unicycle-balancing
Windows, Linux and HTML5 builds available.

That's a really neat idea.

I think i found a solution to my problem

https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/4

https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/93

y'all should play Pokemon Unite with me, just saying

SW-0735-2163-2233

I've talked about it mainly on Discord, but I have been playing Pokemon Unite a whole bunch too. I even bought a HDMI capture device and occasionally stream it there.

Sooo I've been doing the Bloodborne thing (PSNow sub streamed to my pc), and I've been enjoying it a lot. I've not finished it yet, but it makes me wish I had a PS4 so I can play the DLC, because sadly the PSNow stream version doesn't include it.

The only thing at the game awards that matters:






hell yeaaaah

finally some good fucking games

I fell into the Planet Crafter demo, which I think has a long way to go but is keeping me hooked in that "let's see how much more content there is" way.



Planet Crafter is easy to explain: it's Subnautica with terraforming. You're on a crappy lifeless world, your job is to bootstrap yourself some machines and terraform it. You have a survival pod with basic supplies and a fabricator. You craft stuff from local resources, and then use that stuff to upgrade your stuff so you can explore farther and get more stuff. You assemble a base pod by pod. There are wrecks to explore. You have to watch your oxygen.

It's just Subnautica. (Except above ground and no critters, obviously.)



What makes Planet Crafter different and IMO worth mentioning, is the terraforming. As your terraforming score rises, the environment around you changes to look less shitty. First you get blue skies, then clouds, then rain.



Then ice starts melting and the low areas turn into lakes. If you built your base near your starting pod like your gamer instincts told you, that shit's going to be underwater and you'll need to disassemble it for someplace dry.



Pretty soon you can move your horticulture outside and have flowers all over the place.



And launch rockets to summon meteor showers. Meteors can't hurt you or buildings (at least right now) but showers are visually and audibly impressive. The skybox looks great too.

There's an insidious idle-game loop where as your score rises, you unlock new upgrades to your terraforming equipment that make your score rise even faster. This, along with watching the environment change, is what motivates the player to keep doing stuff. There's always another flower to plant or a solar panel to upgrade.

So that's my TED talk about the Planet Crafter demo. Not really a "recommend/don't recommend" review, just felt like talking about this thing I've been playing recently. But if you want a tl;dr - it's not nearly as good as Subnautica, but early access Subnautica was also not as good as Subnautica so we'll see how this develops.

Already sounds more interesting than Astroneer, a game that looked interesting at first but also seemed to have no point and looked like it would be hell in single-player.

I'd recommend trying subnautica, i was skeptical about it when i first played it as i thought it was one of those shit survival games, but then it turned to be an actual good exploration game

Game machine's busted