Will you be waiting at the finish line to cheer for the 365th?

You’re buyer!

I was really impressed with the demo during a Steam Next Fest last year.

The plot of Mankind Divided ends oddly abruptly, which is a real

Denuvo. Shame.

I’d say it’s a step more “serious racing” than Kart. Transformed had more complex drifting and boosting mechanics to emphasize good racing skills. There are still powerups, but they’re relatively weak. The closest blue shell equivalent is the swarm, which summons a swarm of giant wasps to sit in front of the race leader, but it’s always dodgeable with good steering. The medium-level pickups require good aim or awareness of who’s near you. The Kart strategy of only caring about the last lap is still possible in Transformed, but trying to get ahead as far as possible is also a doable strategy.

Really hoping this can be a worthy successor to Transformed

I’m sure someone at Valve also had fond memories of that toilet.

Amazingly, I played this game when it came out and discovered it has Steam Controller binds out of the box!

At this point, the fact that Portal is in the Half-Life universe is just a fluke. The plots of Portal 2 singleplayer, co-op, and PTI are very “distant” from anything happening with Half-Life. The two series are tonally very mismatched. Their strongest connection is that Aperture bumbled their way into possessing Half-Life plot-critical stuff and then losing the boat that contained it.

I hope the developer commentary is on.

The maps aren’t generated inch-by-inch, if that’s what you were hoping for. Each stage has a bucket of unique rooms it stitches together to create the level geometry. The devs did a clever thing and made rooms with multiple doorways, with two chosen at random to be part of the path, so you can traverse through the same room in a slightly different way each run. At this point, I’ve seen all the possible rooms, but the combination of character upgrades, surprise challenges the game springs on you, weapons, and enemies keeps it fresh. There’s a lot of replayability in just character builds alone, since you can find multiple ways to make each character effective, depending on what perks you got first and what risks you take.

The co-op works well. Gunfire Reborn is a lot easier in co-op because friends can revive each other with unlimited tries, whereas in singleplayer, you get only one revive by sacrificing the character-upgrading resource. Recently, they’ve added a Left 4 Dead-style bot co-op mode so you can have that experience instead of the pure solo one. I’ve actually ground myself into a weird corner where I’m way better than everyone else I play with and can carry a whole team, dealing like 80% of the entire team’s damage across the whole run. I’ve not actually tried public matchmaking, just playing solo or with friends.

In terms of DLCs, each comes with two new characters and a handful of weapons. Each DLC character has a different mechanical focus in case you’re getting bored of the characters you already have. The base game is just fine to start with. I have the first two packs, but the latest one, the third, I skipped during the Steam winter sale to buy more games. The character I was playing here, Zi Xiao, comes from the second pack, Artisan and Magician. His counterpart in that pack is Nona, who is pretty much the red panda version of Gaige from Borderlands 2 (no anarchy stacks, though), summoning and commanding a combat robot. The first pack, Spirit Realm, has a monkey who aggressively upgrades his guns and a fox who, with the right build, can just stop using guns and drop fireballs on enemies instead.

Okay, here’s my final pitch. The game is on sale as part of the launch of the new season. It’s not the all-time low, but it’s pretty close.

By the way, my main is Qing Yan, the other bird boy.

The WADF soundtrack sticks with me

Valve tried trackballs with the Steam Controller but ditched them for trackpads that emulate trackball physics. They found small ones felt bad but big ones were too bulky and heavy. Clearly they like that idea, since every controller-like thing they’ve designed since includes pads.

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you start taking notes while playing the game. You’ll need to keep track of what you have to come back to a place for.

I completed Psychonauts recently on my PC. There’s a Linux native version as well, and both it and the Windows+proton versions seemed to work… adequately. It’s pretty janky, which I mainly attribute to it being an old PC game.

Trying to finish Psychonauts after several years of playing it on and off

It’s actually spelled “chamberrr”

I recommend you avoid games with continuous movement early on. Moving with joystick feels very bad until you get your VR legs. Also get the Lab, Valve’s free VR minigame collection.

I don’t think it has ever gone on sale.

This game is timeless. It was released in a time when the arena FPS was on its way out and server browsers were still the norm for PC online multiplayer, yet it has hardly aged.

Still alive, are we?

Petition to name A Short Hike the best open world game.

Bastion 👍

If you liked Pseudoregalia, why not try the other N64-style 3D platformer released in 2023 with a goat protagonist trapped in a dream, Corn Kidz 64? Yes, this is a particularly specific coincidence. It features great humour, extremely cartoony animation, and polished movement. It’s very much quality over quantity.

I also “completed” Dead Cells and went “yeah, that’s enough.”

Anyway, my games.

Completed games

• Neon White
  • Run fast. Puts you in the speedrunning grindset. Corny anime plot. Unnecessary dating sim elements. The addictive gameplay carries it.
• Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer
  • Retro-style FPS with stylistic suck but still with lots of in-universe and IRL soul. Takes the piss out of edgy teen boy fantasies. This is an essential part of the Hypnospace Outlaw canon.
• Gauntlet Slayer Edition
  • It’s Gauntlet but modern. Fun dungeon crawling online co-op with friends.

Games that aren’t reasonably completeable

• Shotgun King
  • Chess but the only piece you have is a king with a shotgun. It was fun for a bit, but I quickly lost interest.
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
  • Kart racing. Cool maps that change over time. Less bullshit than Mario Kart. It has a hint of more “hardcore” racing mechanics, so it felt like I had more agency. It’s a 2013-era PC game with a surprising amount of jank to make work properly.

His pandemic project in 2021 was making 139 games!

I wishlisted PVKK from seeing its earlier trailer. I’m also aware that Buckshot Roulette is well-received but haven’t played it myself.

rRootage

Legendary bullet hell from 2003. Thank you Kenta Cho

With hindsight, I view this generation of the Pokémon series as an awkward transition to 3D. It’s pretty apparent in the graphics and UI that Diamond/Pearl/Platinum are essentially upgraded GBA games. 3D effects occur only sparingly, and I remember the backpack UI bizarrely having an iPod-style scroll wheel on the touchscreen.

The following generation got more adventurous with the 3D and started using the DS touchscreen more effectively. The “sprite puppet” effect in Black/White looked janky as heck but I honestly loved it anyway. The character sprites in Cassette Beasts worked similarly, which I guess is another reason I liked that game.

Also, man, the pacing of battle animations and UI is so slow in this generation.

Path of Exile has you clearing out the entire pantheon. Then the main campaign is over and you begin the post-game part, which is what actually matters.

We are always allowed to admire oddly hi-fi graphics. I love shaking the vodka bottles in Half-Life Alyx. The liquid inside waves and bubbles and if you hold it up to a light source, the light glows through!

My build for Settlers league was the most fun map blaster I’ve ever made. I made a melee witch (occultist) with Viper Strike that could one-shot entire packs and some map bosses! Just running up to a pack and slapping it and running off.

It was absolute garbage at bossing, though. The survivability was softcore/10.

I played the demo during Next Fest. I found it fun. It reminds me of games like (1) Keep Talking and (2) Papers Please.

My friend kept pestering me to try the game in 2009. The first thing I did in Alpha was die in overworld lava.

This is hardly news. Path of Exile has server queues at the start of every major launch. I think it’ll be great news if absolutely nothing goes wrong with the launch.

Back to you, Steve.

I’m not familiar with the games you mentioned, so I went to check them out. And look what we have on the Steam store page!

Reviews

“It shares some of the feeling of Her Story, albeit featuring today’s technology and with less of a focus on the crime angle. But it has the same small moments of revelation, all of which come together to form a story in its own neat yet meandering way.” Rock Paper Shotgun

Guess that means you have to play it now.

I left my computer to go out with friends to have wings. I was thinking about the puzzle I left behind on the trip there. I was trying to draw the patterns on my phone while we waited. This game gets into your head.

Her Story is a detective game that starts with you sitting at a computer, not even knowing what mystery you’re supposed to investigate. You have to search through the computer’s database for police interview footage to figure that out. Then you have to figure out the answer to the mystery you think you need to solve. The interview clips have a lot of details for you to track and link together. I had to make a big chunky note for this game and even had to implement a system to keep track of the likelihood of the statements.

If you want more point and click adventures, try the Submachine series, which was originally in Flash but now remastered as a ten-game compilation called Submachine: Legacy. The developer trained as an architect, so you get to admire intricate, hand-drawn architecture porn. It starts off as a typical 00s Flash room escape, until you realize it was all a… hallucination. You realize that you’re actually going to explore a vast, utterly lonely underground world as you try to track down the only person who seems to know how to get out. Teleportation and parallel universe travel come up a lot in the series, so keeping notes will be useful. Incredible dark ambient soundtrack, too.

About that blood. Valve forgot to remove it before submitting the game for age ratings, and despite multiple updates over the years, they’ve never bothered to address this. Also, I wish Portal 2 had hard-mode remix chambers like 1 did.

I’ll suggest Vertigo 2 as a worthy followup.

It really impressed me with its detail and scope as a mainly solo effort, by a developer who worked at Valve for a while. It’s a big, cinematic shooting adventure, like Half-Life, so the game calls itself a half-like! There are cool bosses, memorable characters, and wildly varied environments. The story is pretty much a flipped Half-Life: you’re the alien who got teleported in after a big science disaster and you’re fighting your way back home. Compared to Alyx, which takes places around a handful of city blocks, Vertigo 2 throws you around a much larger-scale setting, so it’s more like the Half-Life 2 kind of linear gallery of wild shit.

In the years since I finished Antichamber, my opinion of it has cooled somewhat with hindsight. The early game and some of the mid-game are full of dazzling, logic-defying spectacles, which is what draws you in, but the magic fades later on and you get a lot of puzzles with the block gun until the ending. The teaching style mostly works.

I hate the name “immersive sim”. What is being “simmed”? Why is it immerisve? Isn’t Halo immersive? I was immersed AF. And it’s simming at least as much stuff as Dishonored, I assure you. It’s such a dumb name, just words mashed together. Ditto for “character action game”. Unless your action game features exclusively rocks, it’s “character action”, that means nothing.

Genre names also annoy me. But there’s no authority to define a taxonomy of gameplay styles, so the vocabulary is built informally. I likewise dislike MOBA, metroidvania, roguelike, and soulslike. In the end, we just need the right sequences of letters to accurately represent the gameplay.

In the case of immersive sim, I believe it came from Warren Spector trying to portray how Deus Ex was different from pure action, RPG, and stealth games.