Perpetually tired mental health counselor, sometimes retro game streamer, comedian, Mensan, coffee connoisseur, bacon lover, chronic pain survivor, nefarious pirate, and generally all-round nice dude…
Voices of the Void has been my go to time waster for a couple years now. Dev is a little weird, but the game is amazingly well done and gets somewhat regular updates that expand the story and add new content. You are essentially a scientist sent to work at a SETI-like site in Switzerland. Your job is to maintain the site and search for signals in space, analyze them, and then ship them out to your colleagues, for which you get paid to buy supplies and other things. As you play, random events occur, some funny, some scary. There’s tons of items to buy and decorate your base with. Lots of locations to discover. Sooooooo many secrets to find. I’m constantly impressed by all the work they’ve done with a very small team.
My only complaint is having to reset my save when an update comes out. It’s generally worth it, as there’s usually new events that you’ll miss otherwise, but having to redecorate the base and lose collectables you’ve spent hours on is a bummer… That and I hate the new drive storage rack. I wish they’d bring back then old one as an additional storage item.
Also, the whole damn game is free.
Funko: Hey, chatgpt… Write an apology letter to the gaming community about getting itch.io shut down. Something like “Sorry, we fucked up. Please don’t hate us and continue to buy our stuff!” but make it sound like it came from an intern in HR.
Chatgpt: I got you fam…
I just started playing Terraria again for the first time in a few years. TMODLoader is now a supported extension of it, so there’s a ton of extra content and difficulty modifiers to play with. Having a randomly generated world with a mess of new and unknown stuff definitely scratches that exploration itch.
I wouldn’t say “very ugly.” I think it looks fine, especially for a game that’s been in development for 11 years.
It has a lot of jank, but considering what the game does, I think it does it exceptionally well. Especially considering you can pretty much count the number of open world, randomly generated zombie apocalypse games on one hand.
I strongly disagree. I’ve had immense fun in every Bethesda game, including Starfield and 76. I’ve put hundreds of hours into all of their games, possibly over a thousand for games like FO3 and Oblivion. The only one that truly failed to grasp my attention was ESO. My only real complaint about Starfield was NG+. Losing over a hundred hours of collecting and ship/settlement building isn’t new game plus. It’s a prestige system, and although it makes sense given the ending, it’s a shitty way to restart an RPG. Nonetheless, I’ve still gotten 180 hours out of it. Hell, I just started a fresh game last week and started modding the hell out of it.
With Bethesda, their games are about the fun you make. Sorry if you didn’t enjoy the experiences, but maybe some of them just weren’t meant for you. Personally, I’m looking forward to ES6 and sinking a few hundred hours into it. If it’s a bad game, so be it, but I honestly can’t wait to see what they do!
Super fun games to randomize, by the way. Generates whole new maps, item uses, weapons, souls, and enemy stats. I particularly love that it randomizes the dialogue as well.
Abiotic Factor has been really fun for my buddy and me. Especially with the new update that came out last week. It’s a Half Life themed survival game.
Others that get my vote:
Valheim - Norse mythology themed survival game with Playstationesque graphics
Phasmophobia - THE ghost hunting game(see also Ghost Exile, Ghost Exorcism Inc., Forewarned)
Left 4 Dead - the original Zombie FPS series (see also Back 4 Blood, it’s kinda alright) PILLS HERE!
Risk of Rain - Pretty tough shooter series
Stardew Valley - A modern Harvest Moon, farming/life sim
Don’t Starve Together - If you played Stardew valley in hell, but everyone’s name started with a W
Factorio/Satisfactory - Resource harvesting and logistics sims. One’s isometric, ones first person, one has zerg rushes
Grounded - Honey I Shrunk The Kids: the survival game
Deep Rock Galactic - Left 4 Dead for Dwarves. ROCK AND STONE!!!
Overcooked - cooking and serving game, lots of communication required
Portal 2 - First person puzzle game, also lots of communication required
Barotrauma - Submarine sim on Europa, requires marriage levels of communication
Binding of Isaac - Roguelike shooter that’s sort of Zelda inspired, multiplayer was a little janky last time I tried it, but that was a while ago
The Forest - Excellent horror survival series
Starbound - Terraria in space
Trine series - A modern Lost Vikings, side scrolling puzzles and platforming
Subnautica 2 - A beautiful and terrifying diving/exploration game, original game has a coop mod 8 years in development, but it’s been very buggy
Diablo - First and second games are still very solid experiences and there are some excellent mods out for both
Escape Simulator - Literally an escape room simulator. Has workshop support on steam for even more puzzles.
Green Hell - The Forest, but in the jungle, much more focus on the reality of being stranded in a place where just about everything is likely to kill you.
No Man’s Sky - Space/planetary exploration sim
Dead Island - another zombie FPS
Dying Light - a zombie game with parkour
20XX/30XX - Megaman X styled platformers with roguelite elements
GTFO - Extremely hard, stealth based, alien FPS
Most “Souls” games - Very fun coop summoning, if you don’t mind the sometimes extreme difficulty
Goat Simulator series - Goofy exploration games
Magicka series - Isometric action adventure games where you combine different elements to cast spells
Barony - a true roguelike FPS RPG, voxel based, very hard
Void Crew - Space sim, mission based, sort of Egyptian mythos themed, meant for up to 4 players but definitely possible with just 2
Human Fall Flat - Puzzle/exploration game
Half Dead series - Cube: the game
Orcs Must Die series - Tower defense
Dungeon Defenders series - also tower defense, but with class based
Secret of Mana - One of the first action JRPGS, the remake has drop in coop just like the original, but I believe it’s couch coop, so if you’re not right next to each other, you’ll need something like Parsec to play it
Have a ton more, but those are the ones I can recall having the most fun. Others have probably listed a bunch of them and I probably missed a few good ones, but hopefully a few of them are new.
You could always tinker with some emulators for some retro coop games!
Only $14 on Fanatical right now too. Totally worth it
Such a shame…
Here’s Gideon Zhi’s response and a little explanation, from his side anyway, of what has actually happened.
If you’re not familiar, he runs Aeon Genesis, one of the longest, if not the longest, running translation groups.
Honestly, one of the most impressive out of all the ones I’ve tried. Entirely new game maps, plus soul and weapon randomization. Totally random effects, so you can end up with weapons that are completely useless and won’t hit anything, or ones that fire like handguns. So much customization to make it as hard or as easy as you want. Also, I absolutely love that they also randomized the dialogue too. Sometimes it’s gibberish, sometimes it’s actually funny. Totally worth giving it a try!
Love this site. I check it almost every week to see if anything cool has been added. When retro games started getting boring for me, randomizer gave me a whole new way to play. One of my go to “I’m bored, but don’t know what to do” games is rolling up an Aria of Sorrow seed or one of the DSVania games to see what I get.
Truly a god among video game musicians.
I got my copy free when I bought my PS2 hard drive and never played it once.
I lost my best friend to that game. He got into playing it so much after high school that he basically stopped doing anything else. I’d call him to hang out and he’d ghost me to play the game instead. Eventually I gave up trying…
My friends now want me to get into FFXIV and I absolutely refuse.
They’ve been a shit company for over a decade at least.
I got a laptop for my wife back when we were in college. It developed a problem with the monitor where the screen would look all corrupt after using it for a little bit. My wife, while reciting the prayer of percussive maintenance, would whack it and the problem would go away for a while. So I figured the connection had come loose. No biggie, just reseat it or replace it. The warranty had expired, so I cracked it open to see what was wrong. I reseated the cables in it and it worked… for a bit. Then the problem came back. Eventually we got fed up and bought another one, same model, figuring it was a fluke… It developed the same issue. Come to find out, Asus cheaped out in the ribbon cable for the monitor and installed ones that were too short for the laptop. Looking online, there were a bunch of people complaining about the same thing.
Around the same time as I had gotten her the new laptop, I’d also bought an Asus ZenPad for her to read on. We’ll, that suddenly developed a screen issue too! Almost exactly the same as the laptops! My wife, ever eager to apply kinetic reinforcement, found that twisting the tablet a little bit also fixed the issue. I went online and, sure enough, Asus used cheap cables again! They would last just long enough for the warranty to expire before they’d detach.
I swore to myself I’ll never buy another Asus product as long as I live. If I ever have kids, I’ll disown them if they do too… Fuck these scammers.
Citing it as “an injustice to domestic publishers”, Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development “will die” if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games…
Yeah! It’s so unfair that one person can put their heart and soul into making a game on their own, self publish, and be successful! No way anyone else could possibly do that!
I really like the thought that it brings production and supply lines into play. If we lose Tien Kwan, poof, no more mechs! It gives them the ability to add other things and make them exist “physically” in the game. Yes, we want to liberate everything, but how do we do that if our manufacturing lines are under siege? We can’t be everywhere at once. More than that, if they were to introduce supply disruption, lets say a key planet is hit particularly hard and fast, maybe it takes a while to get things up and running again? Like losing Malevelon Creek, but with that much more urgency because there is more at stake to lose.
It’d definitely let them add more depth to the narrative and really change up the way we go about fighting too.
I finished Mario RPG Remake Wednesday night.
Right now, Pixel Rogues’s Heaven and Hell beta released last night.
Also, partly for the hell of it, but mostly because I’ve been watching Joel’s Meme House series, I decided to load up Sims 3 and challenge myself to building something. Because I learned that a Maniac Mansion TV series existed for the first time this week, I opted for a 1-1 creation of the whole house. Thursday I finished the first two floors and outside of the house, including the garage, and the whole Edison family. Up next is the basement and floors and all the teens. Then set them loose on each other and see what happens.
Tiny Rogues