Diving into my Steam backlog

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Surgo
Duke
Posts: 1924
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Diving into my Steam backlog

Post by Surgo »

I've suddenly changed my gaming habits (read: decided WoW sucked at the moment) and had a bit of free time, so I started diving into my Steam backlog a bit. Here's some thoughts on a few games I've played in the last couple of weeks. Some of these are pretty old.

Starpoint Gemini 2: This game engine is amazing. They've really nailed it. The only problem is that there's not enough roleplaying elements there to make me care. So while it's fun for the moment, I think it's going to wear quickly because it's missing that "make me care" factor. Imagine if this engine was placed in an IP you actually cared about, like Star Wars. My donger is fully raised just thinking about it.

They do have a sequel out now (Starpoint Gemini Warlords) that is supposed to add a lot of roleplaying elements. I don't have the sequel yet though.

Disgaea (the original, on PC): Now this is interesting. Historically I've never enjoyed JRPGs much at all. I didn't like how they pulled you through someone else's story that was usually pretty crappy. I finished FF4 back in the day and then gave up on the genre. But I've been slowly changing. I really enjoyed Fire Emblem Awakening, and now I'm surprised to be really enjoying this as well. I only have about an hour of gametime in this so far, just finishing the tutorials. It's one of a few games I have access to when I travel to Montreal though, so I'm probably going to put a number of hours into it over the next week while I'm away from home.

I think nowadays I'm more willing to have a game pull me through its story and I don't need a more freeform roleplaying experience like, say, Morrowind (which I also found extremely enjoyable). Maybe it's time to explore this genre some more.

Endless Space: It was after playing part of a game of this that I realized why I didn't like the Civilization series very much and, consequently, couldn't really get into this either. I find these games have this weird line where they are simultaneously too complex (there are tons of fiddly bits) but also not complex enough (the win conditions are just way too simple). I think if I was going to play some multiplayer Civ-style game with people I'd be happy to throw down on Endless Legend, which seems like it's Civ but in a setting I'm more chill with. But Endless Space just suffers from all of what I don't like about Civ.

Is there a game in that genre that has more complex win conditions, or do they all look like this and Civ?

Sniper Elite: Pretty old FPS/TPS at this point. I'm on the fourth mission. The difficulty can be all over the place. I thought it would be a little more stealthy than it is; it can feel like a one-man army like I'm playing CoD4 or something. I also thought I'd be in more of a force multiplier role, rather than just running around and killing a bazillion people. Some missions are supposed to be stealthed but I've found it virtually impossible to actually pull them off stealthily. The game badly needs a wait functionality so when you have to wait for an event to happen at 22:30 so you can move forward, you aren't actually sitting around for 4 minutes in realtime. It's not bad, I just thought it would be...different. I'm mildly invested and I'll probably see it through to the end.

It does model gravity and wind effects on bullets, and each gun in the game comes with an entry in the external manual (remember those?) showing how many ticks you need to compensate for when a head-sized object appears at a certain size in the scope. That can be really challenging when people are moving.
Last edited by Surgo on Sun Jul 09, 2017 4:25 am, edited 2 times in total.
Blade
Knight-Baron
Posts: 663
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2011 2:42 pm
Location: France

Re: Diving into my Steam backlog

Post by Blade »

Surgo wrote:Is there a game in that genre that has more complex win conditions, or do they all look like this and Civ?
Crusader Kings 2 has an interesting take: it has no win conditions. It has a scoring mechanism, but it doesn't really push you to reach a high score. Instead you pretty much set your own goals like: "Can I get my lowly count to sit on the throne?", "Can I get the Byzantine Empire to reform the Roman Empire?", "Can I make the Cathar Heresy dominant and wipe out the Catholic Church?", "Can I get Poland to survive the Mongol hordes?", etc.
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