Random Dent
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I’m very deep into a full Rimworld playthrough with the new DLC. Being able to build a grav ship and hop around the world has opened it up so much that I’ll probably be on this for a while yet.
Obligatory weird Rimworld storytime: I’m currently super invested in this one character who was a dirt mole kid that some colony guests just left behind. We took her in because why not, and she turned out to be a pretty good melee scrapper with a penchant for losing body parts. No worries, we have bionics, we can rebuild her. So a bionic eye, an arm and a couple of new legs later, she gets her nose shot off by a turret. At the same moment some vampires arrive and want to have a meeting in our spaceship, and offer to make someone a vampire in return. So now I’m pretty sure immortal noseless cyborg vampire girl is going to end up leading the whole colony but I really want to see where this goes. The current leader is the last OG colonist still alive, but she’s currently ruling from hospital because a lancer blew the spine right out of her body so her effectiveness is limited until I can source a new spine.
I had an experience with Zomboid a while ago that I’ve never had with any other game. I’d had my character going for a while, had my base set up, all was going good and I was looting random houses. I came up to this one house that was completely ordinary but something in the back of my brain just went NOPE. There were no signs of anything sketchy from the outside but some sort of survival switch went off in my brain and was like “if you go in there you’re fucked” and I just walked away and left it.
Of course I’ll never know now if that was accurate or not, but I’ve never had that weird instinct go off from a game before lol.
Yeah that’s pretty much the vibe for Zomboid, the opening text crawl literally says “This is how you died.” It’s not a matter of whether you make it or not, just how long you last and what happens before they inevitably get you lol.
Also if you die from a zombie bite, you can respawn as a new person and track down the zombie of your previous character to loot your stuff back which is fun.
Not as far as I know. I haven’t played the latest update but I did a full playthrough on the last one and I finished it but it was such a slog. It’s like the opposite of the other Civ games, where you sit down for 5 minutes and lose an hour, with 7 you sit down and go “right, I’ll play for an hour” and then you check the time and it’s only been 10 minutes lol.
Exactly this. The new game cycle these days is:
- Game is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff.
- Release date is announced.
- Game is delayed.
- Reviewers/early access people get it, turns out it has none of the cool stuff form the announcement video.
- Game is delayed again.
- Game finally comes out, with 3 different tiers that are like $80, $100 and $120 CAD depending on if you want the version of the game that’s 30%, 40% or 50% complete.
- Game doesn’t work.
- After about two years and 10 DLC packs you have about 80% of the functional game, the other 20% being stuff they were supposed to add but just never bothered, what are you gonna do about it? By this point you no longer care about the game anyway.
- Sequel is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff, devs promise they’ve fixed all the broken stuff this time for real.
- Company gets bought by EA or Epic, all devs are replaced.
- Game is delayed.
Like genuinely who wants to bother with that nonsense anymore TBH.
I’m currently playing:
- Star Citizen (I know I know. I paid like $40 into the Kickstarter years ago and I dip in about once a year or so.)
- Last of Us 2 (again)
- Schedule I on Steam Deck is pretty fun.
I’m also currently gearing up to get horrendously addicted to Rimworld again since there’s apparently a new DLC on the way.
Yeah it’s pretty much the same whenever the Money People get involved in anything. It inevitably stops being about making something really cool, or even just making a living from making something, and becomes all about shipping the absolute minimum viable product and then strip-mining as much cash as you can out of it at all costs, and then dumping it when people stop buying it.
And the thing that gets me is that this makes nobody happy. The creators hate it because they’re making trash, consumers hate it because they’re being ripped off, and the Money People aren’t even happy because they never are. They always want more.
I’ve seen one of those folding phones IRL, and it seemed to have a big visible crease running right down the middle of the screen, which I could also see in this video. It looked annoying enough for a phone, I can’t imagine how bad it would be for a gaming device. Plus as others have said, that button layout is horrendous.
Just as a heads up, the Hitman trilogy is absurdly complicated to purchase for some unknown reason. I own the first two and I literally cannot work out how to buy the third one.
So tread carefully I guess lol.
When the first Steam Machines were announced years ago, I assumed they’d all be running the same hardware like consoles do, and I thought that was actually quite a good idea because it could give game devs a sort of “baseline” set of hardware to aim for, as opposed to the sort of “vaguely make it run on Windows” system we seem to have currently. So if the new ones are all more-or-less the same kit like the Steam Decks are, and they take off well enough, it could be handy in that way I guess.
Plus it’ll presumably run SteamOS so more Linux exposure which I always appreciate.
Once you wrap your head around it, Rimworld is great for stuff like that. Once you start thinking outside the lines you can perform the most outrageous war crimes for literally no reason other than your own entertainment.
Like, if an enemy sends a raiding party you can nuke half the map with nerve gas to kill them, then skin them, eat them to keep the colony growing, then load all their skins into a pod and fire it back into the enemy base. The game doesn’t encourage you to do stuff like that, but it also doesn’t stop you lol.
Or you can use the skins to make hats and trench-coats.
I don’t know the name of it, but I really enjoy the sort of gameplay where you roll up to an enemy compound or something, and then you just sort of chip away at it and cause chaos until it all falls apart.
The sort of thing you’d do in Farcry, where you’d snipe some dudes, plant traps, shoot the tiger cage so the tiger would get out and eat people etc.
I would make a very rare exception and pre-order only certain titles, like if there was a new Civ Game, cause I knew I was going to get it immediately anyway and sometimes they’d let you pre-load.
But with the new Civ being nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I’m not even doing that anymore. I look forward to the real Civ VII release date of sometime in the 2027 Steam Christmas sale lol.
From what I’ve read, the problem at Bioware seems to be with management. IIRC the last Dragon Age was started as a live service game, then scrapped and restarted, and I believe Anthem was also scrapped and restarted at least once, and Mass Effect Andromeda had a bunch of its creative team quit halfway through. So management getting rid of most of the staff for Mass Effect 5 (which was announced as being in development back in 2020) doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
I find it’s great for doing all the piddly day-to-day crap that I don’t want to put much brain power into, like writing cover letters and emailing the bank or whatever.
I think as long as it’s used sparingly it can free you up to do stuff you’d rather be doing, but IMO where people go wrong is when they use it to do the stuff they want to be doing as well.
When I saw the title my brain immediately went “Hitman” before I even read the rest of it lol.
I own the first two, but I haven’t bought the third one because I literally don’t understand the process of how you’re supposed to buy it.
At this point, I can only assume they they don’t want people to purchase their game for some reason.
My main issue with the first game was that I felt like it didn’t respect my time. There were some missions where the game would send you miles away to get something or find a person, only for you to arrive there and have an NPC go “Nah it’s not here” and send you miles in the other direction and do the same thing, and sometimes arbitrarily dump like 6 bandits on you along the way that you had no hope of defeating, so you’d die and go all the way back to square one again. I had to bail on eventually because of that.
Also Wayland in Linux wasn’t improving as fast as they’d like so they’re creating their own development protocol for that too lol
TBH I don’t really believe anything NASA says when it comes to stuff like this. It’s basically been ~5 years away from going back to the moon and ~20 years from going to Mars for my entire life, and I’m not a young person.