The Gaming Den

Ok, what should I buy?

Also, I have Endless Space coupons for 50% off if people want them.

Also, why am I on fucking loser Green Team?

I'm pretty sure that even if you were on the winning team (which is literally just chance, because you are a pathetic and inconsequential drop in a fucking huge bucket and nothing you do will meaningfully affect the daily totals), you would be better off selling cards to the market than gambling on crafting the badge and being one of the few to win items off your wishlist. I got put on purple by chance (yesterday's winner, currently swapping between first and second with red). There are tokens that will switch your team. The token to go purple is selling for 30 bucks. People will seriously pay 30 bucks to switch to purple so they can pay more money crafting badges which will give them an infinitesimal chance of winning three games off their wishlist. If anyone ever needed proof that people are too fucking stupid for the assumptions of the free market to hold, here we are. I wish I could sell my purpleness, though, jesus.

That said, the usual steam sales apply: if you're going to buy an item, check if it's a daily, flash, or community sale. If so, you can buy it. If not, buy it the last day it's on sale.

Oh, the system is made for suckers. Crafting a badge out of $4 of cards in order to just get a chance at items that may or may not be bought by some other sucker for $30 is madness. I craft badges out of cards that won't sell, but give you cards that will sell. I also sell cards during the sales when everyone is mad for crafting badges and the prices go up. I also arbitrage for profit sometimes.

I've made a dollar so far this sale. It's a fun mini-game.

That being said, I'm mostly in the market for game suggestions. I play mostly strategy games, so I often need a nudge to get outside my comfort zone.

Crusader Kings II is great, but I'm not sure if it's on sale.

Crusader Kings II was on sale about two weeks ago.

If you like strategy you should Check out Civ IV if you haven't already. It's more overarching, empire building stuff as opposed to tactical combat. You can try Civ V and it'd be fun, but it's not as deep and complex as IV, the soundtrack and art style are very nice though.

Mount & Blade is Ace, but check out Frozenfoxy's let's play of it first as it's kind of and odd game play style.

The original thief trilogy pretty much invented the stealth genre, highly recommended and they've been on sale once already but it's a good bet they'll go on sale again since the remake came out recently. You can get all three on steam for 12.75 right now

I Am Alive is about climbing through the ruins of a city after a disaster out smarting and thinking your way through fights with very limited resources and doing your best to make it across the ruined city landscape... with the strings section of a pit orchestra following you around waiting for you to start running out of stamina.

The Witcher and The Witcher 2 are pretty fun, 3 is comming out soon and both games are like 5 bucks on GOG right now, for some reason I can get a price for 1 on steam at the moment, but as 2 is also 5 dollars on steam until the 30th so I'm assuming 1 is the same.

Edit: Also, everyone go vote for Psychonaughts to go on sale and then buy it, it's a great game and fuck you if you disagree.

DSMatticus wrote:If anyone ever needed proof that people are too fucking stupid for the assumptions of the free market to hold, here we are.

As an economist, I agree with you completely. I shudder to think of how many weeks of my life I have spent modeling indifference curves and shit like that with the giant blinking caveat over my head that "if real people ever acted like this, the human race would die out."

darkmaster wrote:If you like strategy you should Check out Civ IV if you haven't already. It's more overarching, empire building stuff as opposed to tactical combat. You can try Civ V and it'd be fun, but it's not as deep and complex as IV, the soundtrack and art style are very nice though.

Mount & Blade is Ace, but check out Frozenfoxy's let's play of it first as it's kind of and odd game play style.

The original thief trilogy pretty much invented the stealth genre, highly recommended and they've been on sale once already but it's a good bet they'll go on sale again since the remake came out recently. You can get all three on steam for 12.75 right now

[...]

Edit: Also, everyone go vote for Psychonaughts to go on sale and then buy it, it's a great game and fuck you if you disagree.

1. I don't know if I'm getting into the local front in this particular edition war, but I'm also on the Civ IV > Civ V side. V makes some very slick improvements to interface and kills off the retarded espionage subsystem from BTS, but in virtually every other way I feel like V is a step down in terms of strategic gameplay. It's gotten a lot better with expansion packs, but "one unit per tile" fucked the game mighty hard in ways that expansions can't really fix.

2. God, Mount & Blade. It's a game I should by all metrics love and play forever, but the interface is just such awful shit that I can't do it. If there were a mod that just cleaned up the menu structure without adding 10,000 little bullshit extras I would use it in a heartbeat, but it seems like every mod author with an interest in the UI also has their own special snowflake vision of how the actual gameplay should be.

3. Thief is excellent but very, very dated in terms of graphics and mechanics. I've been easing myself into some early 00s/late 90s 3D games lately by backtracking through Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex, but I'm still not mentally prepared for the low-poly, low-res glory that is Thief. Honestly, I feel that Dishonored is more fun for anyone who isn't mentally ready to go back in time 16 years and re-adjust to the interface and graphics conventions/limitations of 1998.

4. Psychonauts! Woo!

1. To be fair to Civ V it wanted to be more about tactical combat and troop movement, but it just did not adjust to the realities of being about tactical combat and troop movement. The maps are too small so armies can't get big so production and tile yields get fucked which makes everything feel very slow and they made roads cost money, so you can't afford to have a road network which makes positioning troops a pain and all these niggling annoyances just pile up and drag the game down. It's okay, Civ IV is just better. The comparison I've heard most recently is this. In 1984 we got a movie called Ghost Busters, and everybody loved it, so they made a sequel and Ghost Busters II was fine, but it wasn't Ghost Busters. That seems fairly apt.

2. Heh, yeah.

3. Yeah, Thief can be pretty clunky in places and it's pretty ugly, but honestly, I think the over-all control scheme benefits from not being so contextual. Crawling all over the city in the remake is fun, but you never feel like you can just go anywhere and a lot of the time it's unclear what you can and can't climb on, it sucks you can't just pop a rope arrow into any wooden surface and crawl up, and while the contextual parcoring is fine I want to be able to jump on my own so I can see if there's anything on top of that dresser. Also the sound design in the remake is fucked, which is a big problem because sound was really important in the originals and that the sound a guard makes is not in any way effected by the number of walls between you in the guard is really disconcerting after coming off the original. It's still very fun, but the game feels unpolished over all.

4. I Know right?! Someone needs to pony up and fund the sequel already I want to play the adventures of international psychic secret agent Raz.

darkmaster wrote:I Am Alive is about climbing through the ruins of a city after a disaster out smarting and thinking your way through fights with very limited resources and doing your best to make it across the ruined city landscape... with the strings section of a pit orchestra following you around waiting for you to start running out of stamina.

I hate I Am Alive, not because it is a bad game, but because it looks like, and tries so hard to make you think it is, a much better game.

Like, it looks like it might be the perfect zombie survival resource management game that lets you explore and entire map and platform around. But in reality it is a turn based survival game on the most linear of passages that has ever passaged.

Like, nothing pissed me off more than finding out that like 90% of the combats are actually turn based and only look like they are Real time.

Kaelik wrote:Like, nothing pissed me off more than finding out that like 90% of the combats are actually turn based and only look like they are Real time.

What, how do you figure that?

darkmaster wrote:

Kaelik wrote:Like, nothing pissed me off more than finding out that like 90% of the combats are actually turn based and only look like they are Real time.

What, how do you figure that?

Because meleeing people takes so long that it will be interrupted by any other person, and pointing a gun at a bunch of people who don't have guns instantly pauses the action.

So the winning move is to just shoot or surprise kill anyone with a gun, point your gun at everyone else, tell them all to back off until you get one person in position to struggle kill them or near a pit, then press e and pull out your gun again, and repeat.

So, what you're saying is that you just never figured out that if you kill a groups leader the others will usually surrender keeping you from having to use more resources or risk dying under a dog pile and that makes the game bad? Um, fuck you.

Edit, Metro: 2033 is currently on sale for like 3 bucks, it is a good game.

darkmaster wrote:So, what you're saying is that you just never figured out that if you kill a groups leader the others will usually surrender keeping you from having to use more resources or risk dying under a dog pile and that makes the game bad? Um, fuck you.

Edit, Metro: 2033 is currently on sale for like 3 bucks, it is a good game.

Uhhh... How does killing the leader when there is one in any way make the game less turn based? If the leader had a gun, you shot him or surprise killed him. If he doesn't have a gun, killing the ones shooting you is more important.

As I said, once you kill all the ones with guns, you literally just use spacebar to move them far apart and kill them, there is literally no real time aspect to it because drawing your gun effectively pauses the combat.

Except that it doesn't because guys can just fucking decide you're bluffing and attack you anyway. Just because you're shit at the game and don't grasp the concepts doesn't make it bad.

It isn't an action game, you're not playing a third person shooter, the game is about resource management and puzzling your way through fights without getting murdered.

darkmaster wrote:Except that it doesn't because guys can just fucking decide you're bluffing and attack you anyway. Just because you're shit at the game and don't grasp the concepts doesn't make it bad.

Funny how they never ever do that unless you stand too close to them or have a gun themselves. The game is trivially easy, your whining about how I'm shit at the game would be a lot more meaningful if I ever died or failed at all.

darkmaster wrote:It isn't an action game, you're not playing a third person shooter, the game is about resource management and puzzling your way through fights without getting murdered.

Since my criticism is specifically that it looks like a game where you can move around the environment and explore with occasional shooter elements, but that instead the shooter elements are actually a really easy to solve puzzle and that the climbing and city exploration is the railiest rails that have ever railed, I have no idea how telling me that it isn't the game it looks like would help in any way.

Yes, I know that. It tries to look like a much better game then it actually is, but it isn't that game. That is precisely my point.

Gunpoint is a pretty neat stealth game where you play as cyber-Batman. The hacking mechanic is pretty deep: most of the challenge is figuring out a way to solve a level. It's also short and cheap, and it boasts some genuinely funny dialog and achievements.

For anyone who's interested, mount and blade is currently 80% off. Brining the price for the package containing all three versions and the DLC to 7 dollars.

darkmaster wrote:
Edit: Also, everyone go vote for Psychonaughts to go on sale and then buy it, it's a great game and fuck you if you disagree.

I own for PS2 and I can say I disagree, it like pretty much most of the games that I've seen from Tim: An okay game with very good writing and setting.

Fuck you, psychonaughts is great it's colorful, engaging, and imaginative, sure it's got a couple issues with the game play but over all it's pretty fucking solid especially considering it was the first game Tim designed that wasn't an adventure game.

Psychonauts has great writing, excellent art direction, and a wonderful cast of characters. It's actual gameplay elements are basically just fairly well-implemented platforming stuff. There's nothing really objectionable about the gameplay, but there's nothing really new or interesting about it either, so you end up playing the game for the story and other aspects of it rather than because the actual meat of the gameplay is intrinsically fascinating. That's actually perfectly fine by me - I've played and enjoyed many game which had bad 'gameplay' but really good everything else (the archetypical examples being text adventures, but also a lot of cRPGs).

I strongly recommend Pschonauts, especially at the sort of bargain-bin prices it reaches during sales.

Castle Crashers is on sale for 1.50, FTL and Rogue Legacy are both on sale for around for bucks each. These are all great games.

darkmaster wrote:3. Yeah, Thief can be pretty clunky in places and it's pretty ugly, but honestly, I think the over-all control scheme benefits from not being so contextual. Crawling all over the city in the remake is fun, but you never feel like you can just go anywhere and a lot of the time it's unclear what you can and can't climb on, it sucks you can't just pop a rope arrow into any wooden surface and crawl up, and while the contextual parcoring is fine I want to be able to jump on my own so I can see if there's anything on top of that dresser. Also the sound design in the remake is fucked, which is a big problem because sound was really important in the originals and that the sound a guard makes is not in any way effected by the number of walls between you in the guard is really disconcerting after coming off the original. It's still very fun, but the game feels unpolished over all.

Thief remake in one video.

The only game in recent memory that has disappointed me as much as Thief redux is Watch Dogs.

That is actually a glitch, and there are several of those, but I have never encountered it in the PC version.

And Watchdogs is an okay game, I mean it's not starting any revolutions, but it's competent and engaging.

So far, I've gotten Outlast and Shadowrun Returns. I have a bad track record with Bethesda games, so I haven't bitten on Skyrim or New Vegas even though the pricetags are tempting.

For those who haven't played Bastion, I can promise that it's worth the $2.25 (for the next 5 hours anyways).

I bought... Legend of Grimrock. That's it so far. It's pretty good - combat is real-time with cooldown on attacking and with enemies that turn and walk fairly slowly (most of them anyway) so it totally feels turn-based at times. When you go into it, it feels like it's going to be one of those "You're going to die. Just so you know that." games, but I was amazed when I fell down a pit and it wasn't instant death. More than fighting monsters, it encourages you to carefully look over the place for secret doors, and figure out the puzzles.

The only problem is that it's largely skill-based where you put points in skills to learn abilities and get stat boosts, and when you realise how it all works you also generally realise you've done it wrong for a bit (or indeed, in the first fight you realise you wasted skill points by having 3 close combat fighters when the back row can't melee). You can't unspend points, so if you decide you're done being an archer and want to be a swordman instead, well fuck you.

Also some of the timing-based puzzles are really annoying. But not to the extent where I've flipped the laptop over and declared "FUCK THIS SHIT"