I’ve played a bunch of Valheim with friends, but I can’t do it by myself. The openness is cool, but I can’t grind, so any kind of survival or crafting game becomes tedious so fast.

It seems like fun when other people do it, but it just doesn’t happen for me. Oh well!

A few people mentioned Saint’s Row, and it basically wasn’t even on my radar as a series I knew about. I’ll check it out!

All good info, thanks! Time to put some stuff on a wishlist…

Agreed! Okay, if Just Cause 3 is alright, I might give that a shot. And it’s good to know the newer GTAs are still recommended. Thanks!

Yeah, I said in another reply I didn’t even think of Spiderman, but I actually have been playing the remaster of the first modern one, and I agree fully. It totally matches this vibe and it’s pretty great!

Subnautica and I have a tricky relationship…

I tried it once and bounced off basically right away due to needing water constantly.

Then years later I tried again and got into it for about 15 or 30 hours, and was having a great time, but then I hit a point where I lost immersion. I could feel what they needed me to do to get the resources I needed to progress, but I wasn’t into it, and then a big monster broke my favourite little sub and I was like “fuck this, I’m not going to grind around getting the resources to rebuild my sub, I’m out”

But there was some time where I enjoyed it in the middle there!

Oh yeah! I didn’t even think to mention it, but I did really dig just swinging around in Spiderman!

I fully understand. But if it helps (without major spoilers), the horror elements are not permanent, and as you learn to progress you learn to work around them and through them.

But yeah, if they’re too deal-breaky upfront, I totally get that. You do spend a lot of time, pun intended, in the dark.

As a person who didn’t work on New Vegas, and in fact has never even played a Fallout game, I’d like an invitation if we’re giving them out!

Huh. I didn’t know this was a feature Steam had. Weird!

I hear people say this sometimes, but I don’t know what they mean. Is there part of Valve’s system that has a gambling mechanic I’ve just never engaged with?

Or is it one of their games that has gambling?

Because I’ve been using it for years as basically my sole gaming interface and haven’t seen any gambling.

FuckyeahZZT!!!

So good.

Sounds like Nemo needs to spend some time watching Matt Colville’s video on Community

Everyone should watch it, really… even if it is an hour…

Despite being ARM CPUs and Linux based machines, I’m pretty sure most of what they play is Windows x86 binaries.

I think it’s funny that, with reports that Proton games often run better on Linux than Windows, the entire Windows OS is sort of a weird Linux gaming API now…

Hmmm… for reasons I cannot justify my brain is telling me the equivalent for “my man, you really blah blah blah” should be “madame, you really blah blah blah”

Though I agree you can’t correct someone by being like “ahem, it’s madame actually” 😛

I don’t know about this particular title, but I feel like Kickstarter games get a bit of a bad rap for taking a long time or not making it to release. But that’s because the whole point of a Kickstarter game is that we, the public, are acting as the publisher. Putting up money in advance, making an investment, hoping for a great game.

And just like with traditional publishers, sometimes games take years and years to make, and some of your investments crumble and don’t make it.

It’s just that we the public rarely hear about a traditionally published game until it’s already been in development for a while. Until it seems likely to succeed. We’re not used to taking pitches while a game studio figures their shit out. And even then, some traditionally published games crash and burn too!

And that’s all ignoring the fact that a bunch of crowdfunded games are typically by greener devs who maybe don’t know how things are done. But what I’m saying is that even the normal game industry has long lead times and has some burn outs, it’s just that normally an entire community hasn’t built up around them, because they haven’t even been announced yet.

I guess is what I’m saying is that publishing is hard and risky, and crowdfunding is collective publishing, not advanced purchasing. That doesn’t immediately mean that anyone who tries and fails is a scam artist. Most of them probably spent that money trying their best for as long as they could, and nothing great came out the other side. That’s just what business ventures look like, unfortunately.

I know it would be radical, but you could require that they release the server code open source. So it’s not their responsibility to run it, but if the community wants to run it, they can.

Or, if that’s complicated due to licensing etc, they could release a minimal server implementation that maybe doesn’t scale the same way, but at least has the interfaces covered so the community can take it from there. The game could at least still be played.

Right, yeah… It was definitely reminiscent of Magicka. Maybe even a little too reminiscent, since I feel Magicka was a much stronger game.

OK, interesting! It’s nice to know the game wasn’t objectively bad, and was only just “not for me”, since I like the devs!

Huh. My siblings and I love the Trine games, and wanted to like Nine Parchments, but found it to be one of the worst games we’ve ever played. I don’t think we could find a single redeeming quality, and it just seemed like a total misstep.

So seeing it here on this list makes me think maybe there’s something that was okay about it? I’m curious what people liked…

(all the rest of these seem like good games, though, which honestly makes me even more confused about Nine Parchments’ inclusion…)