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Yeah check out Inzoi, I haven’t tried it since I don’t really get into Sims type games… but even if Inzoi isn’t a replacement this is a space RIPE for indie game companies since gameplay is mainly about roleplaying, story, mechanics and meaningful interaction rather than cinematic gameplay or insane graphics and physics engines.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2456740/inZOI/
I for one look forward to an explosion of Indie Sims-likes because even though I am not that interested in the genre I can appreciate how massively popular it is for not really being taken seriously by most of the game development world and I think that hurts the artistry and inclusiveness of game development as a whole because it sends the message to Sims fans that they aren’t actually serious video game fans when they are… and there is likely a MUCHHH bigger market than even the Sims can reach here given the genre is so underserved and innovation is slow at the moment (also nobody markets to Sims fans like they are video game fans in general, there is this sense of “casualness” to Sims that I think is silly, casual games are video games and “casual gamers” are gamers, period end of story).
Another game that gives me Sims vibes but isn’t really in the same category is Let’s School, I haven’t tried it but it gets really good reviews as a thoroughly fleshed out school management game where you build a school and try to grow it while having to manage students, teachers and the campus grounds. I think it might scratch a similar itch for people.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1937500/Lets_School/
I also haven’t tried Clanfolk but from the reviews I have read it seems like a chiller Rimworld with a bit more people/family management mechanics. It gets very highly reviewed, don’t pass over it because it looks like anotheerrrrr Rimworld-like. It seems like the house building and people management part of the game potentially might intrigue Sims fans even though it is a survival game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1700870/Clanfolk/
If you would like a Sims like game but focused instead on “dogs” that also makes you feel like you are on a dose of psychedelics than check out Wobbledogs.
Well at least we got Motor Town Behind The Wheel, I am not sure review bombing that game would be possible. The love is too strong and too pure.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/
What? Just sort reviews by most helpful and set it to a timeframe that is relevant for you.
I make sure to rate helpful reviews or leave them myself, so there are definitely people out there trying to help make the actually relevant, non-loweffort-meme reviews that contain illuminating information rise to the top.
I have noticed it in a targetted fashion against certain games, especially when they are threats to large game franchises that make a lot of money.
For example one of my favorite games Operation Harsh Doorstop is quite regularly review bombed, ultimately I don’t see how people would be so consistently motivated to review bomb the game, attack the developer and attempt to spread drama on the discussion forum unless they are paid. I am not exaggerating, this is an entirely free moddable game (hence why it can be review bombed easier I guess) and it really makes no sense how vile some people are in the reviews. Sure the game is in early access, it has lots of rough edges but the core game is just fun… the way people talk about it in the reviews is truly mindboggling and I have played A LOT of games so I am not just being biased here because I like the game.
I can only conclude that there is a lot of money in multiplayer FPS games and the owners of IP like Battlefield, Arma, Squad and live-service trash games like Enlisted REALLY don’t want there to be a fun, free moddable alternative to their shit offerings.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/
Inzoi
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2456740/inZOI/
Clanfolk
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1700870/Clanfolk/
Amazing Cultivator Simulator
https://store.steampowered.com/app/955900/Amazing_Cultivation_Simulator/
Correct, to put things into precise terms, the corporate too-big-to-fail gaming industry is unable to make a profit in the gaming industry if there is any functional competition at all, even competition from indie game companies with much smaller budgets.
Just because large corporations with no desire to just let artists make art cannot make a sufficient profit unless boosted with the artificial advantage of having the rest of the industry destroyed… doesn’t mean that there are too many video games out there to make money from making another one it means large corporations suck at making good video games and are unable to keep systems of upper management from undermining everything redeeming about them.
Except this line of reasoning is empty and it will only ever be wielded by games journalism and large gaming companies to convince you to adopt the streaming model of gaming where you don’t ever buy any games. They will make you feel like you are being so much less wasteful, because oooooooh think of the horrorable backlog of unplayed games you would have owned otherwise!?!?!!
The thing is, who cares if you never play all the video games you buy? Video games are art for fucks sake, it is ok to buy them because you love artists even if it doesn’t materially change your life, you can still be happy about having collected the work of art, ESPECIALLY when it is in digital form.
I am so tired of this “my backlog is too big crap”, nobody cares, great you have a big backlog stop going along with the narrative that we need to “spotify” gaming to solve this “problem”.
Nah, BAR is WAYYYY better than that, BAR represents the idea of Total Annihilation passed around, tweaked and refined for the better part of two decades. Total Annihilation itself is a high water mark of RTS games and Beyond All Reason is the latest in a series of Spring Engine/Recoil Engine projects that elevate the idea to a veryyyy niche e-sport, this family of games just hit on all cylinders consistently in a way that makes most other RTS games except Supcom FAF look flat and boring in my opinion.
The ease of queing up unit actions and such makes it almost impossible to tolerate how barebones the controls are on other RTS games. The depth and variety of units in the game is awesome too. Tanks drive like tanks, airplanes fly like airplanes, ships move like ships should, this isn’t another game with fiddly units that are meant to be micro’d back and forth identically no matter what kind of unit they are (i.e. games where flying units move identically to ground units, they just have different abilities like they can fly over impassable terrain).
When a unit fires at another unit, there is a projectile modeled that launches with some degree of accuracy and it may or may not hit, the battle is actually being simulated in the game in a way that is joyously chaotic and most other RTS games don’t even come close to the pure fun of it. So many other RTS games have units attack each other like a player fighting a mob in an MMORPG, it is just a matter of DPS, health and which abilities are triggered, the visuals of the attack are just there to inform the player that things are happening… No… in BAR when your huge tank shoots a massive tank shell at an enemy base you sit there wondering whether it is going to hit or not and then you get to watch the chaos as nearby units are blown sideways by the impact, none of it is aesthetic visuals or lame rockpaperscissors contrived relations between units, what happens is what happens as a massive battle unfolds with every bit of weaponry modeled going back and forth.
:)
Been having a blast playing Beyond All Reason against AI.
I would recommend syncthing and plain text files organized in a simple clear folder structure.
I would alternatively recommend Logseq, Obsidian or Joplin but the issue is file syncing/file share.
Actually Cryptpad!
I recommend using a general tool in a simple way rather than look for a specific niche tool in this case but that is just me.
The issue isn’t so much that they’re banning pornographic content
I agree with your point but also what the hell, why is this considered a normal well adjusted thing to say…
(second quote from different person)
I’m all in for banning pornographic content
Why? What is the flimsy, unscientific, puritan christian conservative reason and why is it ok for people to force it on everybody else?
Agreed, I guess I meant it potentially had a great interface, I have memories (I SWEAR they are real -I scream into the void) that the xbox 360 had a really slick interface at one point with very clear effective panels/tabs that was progressively enshittified… but if it hadn’t… it would have been nice.
That was a different timeline, if such a one where microsoft didn’t enshittify xbox exists.
Come join the community I made recently specifically for battlefield like games made by indie developers such as the superb ww2 battlefield-like Easy Red 2 !
Fuck EA
In my opinion within the steam store finding good steam curators and going through their recent reviews is the best way to discover quality new games that are actually worth a second look.
Go into your steam library and go to the store page for some of your favorite games (preferably less well known games) and check out the steam curators who reviewed the game and start exploring!
yawn
Here are some better recommendations for games that aren’t owned by EA.
Operation Harsh Doorstop - free and moddable tactical shooter with big maps and vehicles, vanilla gameplay is fairly realistic but there are mods that totally change up the gameplay like Casualfield. This game has a dedicated group of youtube content creators who hate on this game… I don’t get it… because the gunplay is fantastic and the mechanics are an elegant evolution of Project Reality type squad spawns and player built basic infrastructure. Sniping is also a BLAST. Singleplayer is in heavy development but multiplayer is where it is at now with the game. It is in early access and is definitely rough around the edges, but the core gameplay is just straight up better than 99% of fps games I have played so I don’t really care lol.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/
Easy Red 2 - Really fantastic WW2 tactical shooter with big maps and LOTS of different period accurate vehicles and a quickly growing population of players. The general interest this game has in portraying WW2 beyond the tired and boring moments that are usually portrayed is very cool and the gameplay is ROCK solid. This game is extremely affordable for the amount of scenarios, weapons vehicles and historical context that is brought into the game design in a clearly thoughtful way and I recommend ALL of the DLC even as an impulse buy when you purchase the base game. It is worth it, Easy Red 2 is an absurdly easy recommendation at its price point.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2/
Angels Fall First - A superb Battlefront-like/Battlefield 2048 that is first person. This game is in early access and has a small playerbase but the core gameplay is polished, locked in and very very fun. Weapons feel great, vehicles are easy to jump in and start using but clearly have a lot of skill depth to them… Overall the menu and UI is FANTASTIC, at the deploy screen the game will prompt you if a vehicle is available to take and let you spawn directly into it, you can also see a cue of vehicles that are going to spawn for your team soon… Check it out! Even with the low playerbase it is a great bot bashing game, the AI is fun to play against and uses vehicles.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/367270/Angels_Fall_First/
Also, for kicks and giggles I am gonna recommend Empires Mod an old source engine multiplayer RTS/FPS team based hybrid that is actually still in development which is super cool. By now the UI has lots and lots of quality of life additions and tooltips and the whole thing is very impressive even if the age of the source engine and various components going into the experience are obviously very dated, Empires Mod is legitimately still an awesome game and it deserves way more players! There is a discord you can check out to find out when games are happening.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/17740/Empires_Mod/
Ok I had to add another oldie but goodie that has an open source project around it now!! That game is Enemy Territory and if you know that game you likely have fond memories of spending hours playing it like I do. No vehicles but the teamplay is very objective based a lot like payload in Team Fortress 2 (which is TF2s best mode by far so…).
Some more obscure recommendations that didn’t quite make my main list of team based objective games with a lot of depth to them but also lots of action…
Unvanquished is a spiritual successor to Tremulous, I haven’t played it so I don’t want to recommend it in the main list but the idea of a team of alien monsters and space marines fighting asymmetrically is super cool and riffs on games like Empires Mod in a cool way.
Renegade X is a fan re-make of C&C Renegade a FPS/RTS hybrid game that was quite fun back in the day, the mod is still pretty rough around the edges so I didn’t want to put it on main list with others. The same developers also are making another game called Firestorm which is based on a different time period in the C&C universe. These developers are not employees of EA or making money off this I believe, you can see the developers really had fun making Renegade-X from my brief experience.
You aren’t understanding me, you keep trying to debate from the axiom that this is a zero sum game.
In otherwords when I say
“We need to increase wages and employment opportunities across the board for immigrants including tech worker immigrants”
You hear
"We need to hurt tech workers born and raised in the US who are already hurting.
My point of issue is that I did not say that, rather you are applying an axiom that those two MUST be inextricably linked and if there is even a remote chance we can improve the wages and general quality of life of tech workers born and raised in the US AND tech workers that want to immigrate to the US than the logic of applying that axiom becomes fundamentally questionable.
The US is the richest country on earth, or was… it is a lie the oligarchs and ruling class tell us that we cannot afford to pay US workers a living wage, tech workers or otherwise and it is a further lie that hopeful immigrants (tech workers or not) are a threat to the wellbeing of the US, far from it, immigrants are certainly the lifeblood of this country if there is anything still yet redeemable to it.
That is what you don’t realize or refuse to realize.
This is NOT a zero sum game between tech workers who want to immigrate to the US and tech workers who were born and raised in the US.
The future is a shared solidarity not an increasing division, don’t take my word for it, notice rather that large corporations favor this kind of atomization of workers into nationalisms, it makes the job of people oppressing workers in the US and abroad far easier when we take your perspective.
I am not disputing the details of anything you are necessarily saying, what I am saying is that you are even still leaning into the lie that there isn’t enough decent work to gone around for all of us.
You need to get that out of your head, fundamentally, before we can begin to envision a humane path forward for tech work in the US, either for immigrants or people born and raised in the US.
Well yes, but understand this is the function of gamepass being so cheap at the moment, to convince you temporarily that it is in your best interests as a consumer to rent video games rather than buy them because for now massive corporations like Microsoft are artifically holding the consumer price of these subscription services low to entice enough customers to buy in that they can then turn around and destroy other methods of earning a living in the video game industry as anything but a tiny indie game studio and waves wand with flourish all of a sudden the video game industry sucks even more than it used to and you have to watch ads every 10 seconds even though you are paying more for gamepass “premium crystal edition” than you do for all your streaming TV services combined…
Look if that is the future y’all want, great, but just be honest about it at least?
Yes and no.
Yes because this is why there is a massive body of leftist academic, philosophical and political writing on the topic… yes because this is why organizing is a skill and unions can be good or bad. It is hard and you are gonna need all the help and tactics you can get.
No because there is or at least was a prevalent belief in US tech culture circles that being an expert in programming by extension made you an expert or a soon to be expert on everthing else. An expert on education, an expert on health care… just the damage from those two categories alone to the wellbeing of US citizens…
Far from me to say there isn’t a basic beauty to aspects to programming that speak to logic and math… but no… the world is full of a million different kinds of craftspeople because every form of genius has its own peculiarities. Unfortunately however this delusion reached a degree of popularity that I think undermined the ability of tech work culture in the US to establish a fertile substrate for effective organizing and unionizing to grow from.
I am not saying that this is unique to tech workers, simply that the demographic reached a critical point of naivety that corporations were able to solidfy their power.
It could have happened to Plumbers or Electricians (I mean they tend to be decent jobs in the US I think), the only thing unique to US programmers/tech workers is that for a brief moment they were existentially valuable to the empire and thus it had to suffer decent working conditions for programmers/tech workers. Though, in this respect programmers/tech workers aren’t that unique in the story of the US empire, the obvious reference here being New Bedford and the way the whaling industry briefly centered the nexus of power there to abandon it just as abruptly for another city… Silicon Valley for awhile but how much longer?.
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalingheritage.htm
https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2022/03/huge-architecture-mills-of-new-bedford.html?m=1
Many tenants in New Bedford have been forced to spend more of their income on housing, Census data shows. In 2021, nearly half of New Bedford’s renter households were considered “cost-burdened,” which means they spent more than 30% of their income on rent.
https://newbedfordlight.org/barely-making-it-in-new-bedford/
The amazing scifi TV show Severance can be seen as a sort of Tech Culture Gothic that attempts to reconcile with the futility of experiencing late stage capitalism as a tech worker in 2020s US. Severance can be seen as a gothic work that is grappling with the growing realization that the fall of tech workers from the bourgeoise petit class or whatever you want to call it has been cemented by the torpor of US tech culture towards organizing to protect the future of their careers from the ruling class. Scifi and fiction like Severance will be interpreted by future academic analysis as a touchstone to begin an analysis of why US culture in general was so blind to the obvious systematic violence of tech corporations that reached an unsustainable peak in the 2020s.
An echo of a decrepit shuttered massive brick mill building in New Bedford Massachusetts, a strange monolithic monument to a power long gone. Towering mill window aclove after alcove filled with cinderblocks for want of unshattered glass echoed by empty floors of office cubicles and an insect like ghostly parking lot extending radially around The Holmdel Complex like a carapace.
A youtuber/streamer I really like who plays a lot of Vintage Story and has created themselves and shown off a lot of other Vintage Story builders work is Ashantin.
https://m.youtube.com/@Ashantin3
What I like about Ashantin is the vibe, they really understand the game but are super relaxed and chill in their playstyle. As in… Ashantin gives off the moment to moment vibes of a very casual player but they understand the game really well at the same time and it is a really pleasant combination that makes good background watching.
If you are curious about Vintage Story it is also a great way to get an idea of what the gameplay is like (I HIGHLY recommend Vintage Story!!!).
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Yeah but those are all brutally hard survival games!? They don’t give me a Sims vibe at all.