I found out GoG is having a summer sale, so I just loaded up on about 15 games for $25. One of the first games I have started playing is a cool little title called CrossCode. It has puzzles and RPG elements with a nice "shmup" twist. Great retro anime art style, too!
I have been playing Planet Crafter for the last four days or so, and it is crack. I'm not kidding, I have spent 20 hours on this game already over the past four days. The music, the environments, the resource gathering, the science, the base building, the jetpack, it's all so enjoyable, juggling water, air, and food supplies while terraforming this planet. I love it so much. I play it on relaxed/easy settings and while there is still a good element of danger, it's a blast and hours will whittle away and I won't even realize it until it's time to make dinner. This is crack for people like me. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1284190/The_Planet_Crafter/ Good game. Recommend.
I haven't played anything in probably a decade or so (I got overwhelmed by 5 or 6 that interested me all at once and kinda got selection paralysis and just stopped. I think the last game was after I got the Mass Effect collection and then realized how very big/long it was and blinked. BUT There's a pretty strong chance that the new Snake Eater polish will pull me back in (albeit I could wish they had done MGS first - still my first love).
https://kennymakesgames.itch.io/pin Fancy pinball machine with, like, supernatural effects as you battle monsters. It's a little small and fast-paced and jittery in my browser to be fully enjoyable, but it probably runs much better on newer machines and there's a demo download. Fun.
Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader from Owlcat Games. If you like reading lots of text and stuff set in a grimdark universe, you'll enjoy it, though combat (at least on the easier levels) gets trivial after a bit, especially if you use Kibellah from the first DLC as a companion or take Cassia wherever you go. Rogue Traders are basically conquistadors/privateers IN SPAAAAAACCCEEEE, with each being phenomenally rich (seriously, your character alone rules three major planets and can afford to fund colonisation of more) and empowered to deal independently with situations ordinary citizens would be accused of heresy for and put to death (making deals with aliens, using their tech, seeking dark knowledge, etc). Naturally, you have equally/more powerful enemies. I'm doing a 2nd playthrough now, trying different main character options (though I always pick Iconoclast - really, an idealist would be dead in two seconds in the Warhammer 40K setting but I'm an idealist with a fucking big starship and lots of deadly compatriots). The seller is supposedly doing a Dark Heresy game on the same lines for next year, which would have you leading a group of Inquisitorial agents instead of a Rogue Trader and their retinue.
Been killing time with a few freeware games. Speedrunning Mother of all Battles and got it down to conquering the world in 65 days, take that Jules Verne. In Columns I got like six wins in my first fifty games which is absurd. Maybe the pseudorandom code is nicer on Windows 7.
I too like Rogue Trader. You description is accurate, though I frame it as "Christopher Columbus on meth." Or, that's how I play it, anyway.
Won MOAB in 55 days. Also last night I tried a new strategy of getting a transport going ASAP and it was one of the annoying maps where you start right next to an enemy. So I actually turned that on its head and wiped out the blue player in 35 turns. That it took 35 turns when I was devoting all my resources to wiping out a guy with just two cities, and doing it pretty efficiently I thought, maybe tells you how wild it feels to capture all the cities and wipe out both threats in 55 turns. Columns I went on a probably 70- or 80- game loss streak until I won another game to bring my winning % back up to 5%. Now that's the Columns I know and, um, play despite all the frustration.
The year is 2026 and I have defeated Level 8 in Descent without cheats. Woo. Going from one of the best tracks in the game to one that's weakened by one of the MIDI instruments being, well, weak. It's a "nervy" track though, which is a good pick for this level. It's a "military dig" which so far seems to mean the robots like cloaks and trap doors. I dislike both, but I can live with it. I'm just saying, it'd be funny to come across a Class 1 drone that shoots missiles or something.
Just finished Outer Worlds 2. Overall, not as good as the first one, but still enjoyable. The plot is significantly darker and less silly, but still silly enough. It's also significantly less corporation focused than the first one, but corporate-focused enough. Also, the player character is an Earth Directorate agent who holds the rank of commander. So, all the voiced dialogue refers to the player as "Commander" or "the Commander." I especially liked that part. It's almost as though I made a list. Much like with Starfield, the reviews started fairly positive then started sliding toward negative. Which, is how it should be. We deserve games that are absolutely perfect that cost, at most, $20. The only way to get that is to complain incessantly when games aren't perfect or cost more than $20. It'll totally work.
I've been playing Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe lately. It's free and fairly engaging as well. I've been playing around with AI competitors, some are better than others. Still trying to find AI competitors that make the game harder. Without a good a challenge the game is too easy to be successful in. Setting up a few good train routes in the first year lets you build additional stations, infrastructure quickly. Within the first year you can already pay back the initial loan and build continuously by the second year or sooner. I've been playing it off and on for the last 20 plus years. There's been several updates since it was first released and still has a pretty good audience. And it has a Beta update that was released 4 days ago.
The trap doors have been surprisingly weak. It's kind of a bipolar level. On one hand, there are a lot of cloakers and trap doors, there's lava in tight places, and also the early sections are wide-open crisscrossing tunnels without doors to partition the mine. This last is important because some of the robots have gotten Ideas about hearing you sneeze from half the level over and zipping over to ambush you from behind. Once I tracked a few of those down, and learned to anticipate others, I started getting the security keys. And then it became clear the level was pulling its punches. The monster maker made only middling robots and was at a good sniping angle and undefended by anything important, so many spots that would have been a pain were devoid of enemies, even the trap doors haven't hid any real nasties. (Honestly, having a bunch of baby spiders come boiling out is pretty funny.) The blue and yellow areas were just about a breeze, like the developers spent so much effort making the main part evil they just repeated bits from Level 7 and Level 3 for the keys. And the level is swimming in energy like it's Level 2 all over again. Makes me wonder if the final area will be as nasty as I expected or only comparable with previous levels. Eh, there'll be a few mega hulks at least, right?
Level 9 is done. I will say the music was very satisfying to move the automap around to. A lot of cloaking devices on the map, but they were never anywhere I felt they were useful to me. Level 10 is where one gets the fusion cannon. It's purple and shakes the ship dramatically but I don't expect to use it. Likewise, as much as I like the green plasma bolts, the plasma cannon is outclassed by quad max lasers in energy usage and damage output. It's good for fun and if you don't have good lasers yet (either you started a new game on this level or lost your lasers when you died earlier, or you're playing PvP). But not practical. I believe a red hulk in Level 9 took fourteen full plasma salvos to kill, whereas I just sniped another one with maybe eight or ten half-salvos of lasers.
Got Level 10 done quickly by my standards. A much less stressful music track for a much less stressful map (other than the red area, which looks like claustrophobic lava). This is where all the red hulks missing from last level were saved up for. I haven't seen any class 2 drones, small hulks, or medium lifters since level 7 at least. They've been upgraded to the swing-arm shooters, spiders, and four-arm lifters, all of which are Scary Red. All the red gets to be unimpressive after a while (other than that red area). The spiders aren't near as stressful as they might be at higher difficulties, and none of these are particularly scary on this map. This map does introduce the plasma shooter robots, which are scary and not red but not in great position to do damage. And there's a fusion cannon which I will probably never use seriously. It kicks and if you charge too much it starts draining shields. The plasma and fusion cannons are probably the weak spot in the design of Descent. The plasma in particular could maybe have been rebalanced if they wanted someone playing through the campaign to use it. Anyway: fun level, nice breather after level 9, I even felt competent at times. I just accepted the red hulks weren't going to let me leave with max shields and enjoyed the flight. (There were *not* very many shield powerups.) There's a secret exit that leads to an optional level with Yikes Scary Robots from future levels. I saved twice, once going to the secret level (which uses level 2's music, very good call) and once to level 11 (which starts you off under attack and has a nicely frantic music track to match). I've never explored either, even with cheat codes, so this will be quite interesting.
I decided to fire up my N64 emulator and play some Turok. After fiddling with settings for like two hours, I just could not get things to feel right with my Xbox controller. So, I tried to set it up to play with keyboard and mouse, and that didn't work out very well. So I decided to check Steam and see if there was a PC port/remaster or something available, and it turns out there is! So I bought Turok 2. This game is so much better playing with a keyboard and mouse. Even on an actual N64 with a real N64 controller the Turok games are a bit awkward to play.
