Saturday!
Ember got released on Steam with little fanfare last week and, lemme tell ya, that’s a crying shame.
It’s a bit of an old school RPG that might strike you as not being as deep as Diablo, or Fate, or Torchlight (there aren’t classes, for example) but you can build and customize your character and the crafting is pretty sweet and if all you’re looking for is a nice little game to get you to the other side of September, you’re only going to be paying around $10 for this.
One of the little things about it I like is that it is possible to get yourself into a great deal of trouble. For example, if you wander too far from home, you can find monsters that you cannot possibly kill. In Diablo, for example, if you were going from here to there and you wandered down all of the side paths and did all the side quests and you weren’t an absolute idiot about where you put your skills, you could kill the boss with what you found along the way.
Golly, not here! It’s possible to just wander in this open world and get yourself to a place where you shouldn’t go yet. (You have to work at it, of course, but it’s nice to see that sort of thing.)
It gives the game just a little feeling of playing without a net.
If they were trying to sell the game for something like $40, I’d give a short laugh and say “nah, thanks” but for $10? Hey, you can’t go wrong.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
I just got the new Phoenix Wright game. The production values are the best yet, and the puns are atrocious, but the first case took a really long time to really get moving, so I’m a bit apprehensive at the moment….Report
Offworld Trading Company. It’s a resource-gathering/empire-building game in the same vein as Civ. The only way to win is to make tons of money and buy out your competition. There’s no combat, but there are black market tools you can use to trip up the other guy.Report
I’ve been playing the fun game of “WHY IS ALL MY CABINETRY BREAKING” and jury-rigging repairs with gorilla glue. And Fallout.Report
gonna finish new deus ex at some point. it is good, not great. it has moments of great craft and care. and moments of a great lack of craft and care. kind of irritating.
also playing enter the gungeon with the kid. it’s properly dumb.Report
I’ve been playing a lot of RimWorld lately. I’ve played it off and on for last two years, but started messing around with mods since it’s now on Steam. It’s early access, but I’ve gotten well more than my money’s worth off the game.Report
Master of Orion 4.
The negative reviews are all “it’s just MOO2 with better graphics”
and my response is “you say that like it’s a bad thing.”Report
Do you have more information? I have Master of Orion 4 on my wishlist but… well, I didn’t want to get it if the spying didn’t work and I really, really, *REALLY* didn’t want to get it if the diplomacy didn’t work.Report
RPS had a couple of depressing articles over the weekend:
– They think the new MOO isn’t the “nostalgia critic” version of MOO, it’s the “TV Tropes” version of MOO… It doesn’t break any new ground, and it hasn’t learned from the two intervening decades – it even makes some of the same mistakes the original games did, when it would almost have been easier not to, especially since we’ve learned, and the state of the genre, not just the state of the art, have progressed.
– They are afraid the new Shadow Warrior will be “Diablo as a FPS” with the procedurally generated content and multiplayer. Rather than the admittedly on-rails 2013 version where, although you were stuck playing asshole Lo Wang rather than whatever headcanon you’d prefer, you’d often react in the same way Wang does just because it’s so natural to.Report
I’m down with it breaking no new ground whatsoever, so long as diplomacy and spying work.Report