I turn that shit off asap. I’ll put cool stickers on my case or use a low backlight for the keyboard but otherwise why would I want a bunch of distractions from the screen?

Oh yeah we’re totally not going to ever peek even a little at all your private communications even though we’re now explicitly collecting them to feed into an LLM. It’s a secure cloud environment!

I love how the game just unashamedly invites you to bust it wide open and do truly heinous combos. Great character designs and music too. What’s your favorite clans so far?

Cavalry girls is honestly such a good game. At its most basic level, the mech combat is fun to control and satisfying. Lots of mechanics, but they do a really good job of introducing them over the course of the campaign, so it’s not too overwhelming and they come in to heighten the core loop as it gets more routine. The mech customization is pretty in-depth and I feel like there’s pretty good opportunity to try out a variety of builds and team compositions. The management layer isn’t spectacular, but it serves to break up gameplay pretty well and there’s a hint of something more to the relatively simple story.

The translation is not good, but excluding a few confusing item descriptions it’s not hard to tell what’s being communicated. There are maybe a few too many things to do in the management layer and I’ve found that there are some things I’ve been able to just ignore.

The character designs and intermittent comic sequences are fucking hilariously boobed up. To the point where it’s more comedic than erotic to me - though I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be a parody. Generally the tone of the game is fairly light and slightly humorous despite dealing with rather grim subject matter - although anything particularly awful is generally alluded to rather than confronted directly - and this plus the massive hoonkstangos can be a little dissonant.

All in all I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a twin-stick shooter with character building and light management aspects. It’s pretty cheap and the game shows you what it’s about basically immediately, so it’s worth a tryout if it sounds fun.

Also always interesting to see games out of China and their particular conventions and styles.

I put some hours into Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 the other day. It was good.

I kinda like the mostly mindless killing a bajillion enemies and picking up powerups. You can definitely do some character building, but it’s not very in-depth or anything. There’s a meta-progression that’s whatever so far, but I did feel pretty dope when I got a fat haul of resources after a really good run and felt like my next one would start substantially more powerful. I think I unlocked a shortcut too? Hopefully, because one thing I’m not very positive on with this game is that the environments are quite large and there’s a lot of running. I’m also not sure if there’s any way to “extract” and take all your loot back with you. I hit a point where I was like, “I definitely want to just end the run and get out,” and it didn’t seem like there was any choice but to keep pressing forward, even though I was very several levels deep into the run.

Overall a pretty comfy game to dissociate to while you listen to the news. Also plays pretty well with controller, although some classes might work better than others.

Otherwise I haven’t been playing a lot of vidya outside of my Dominions turns. (Still a handful of spots in Lucid’s tournament! If you search lucid tactics discord you should find it.)

I have been enjoying playing Lancer with my tabletop group the last few weeks. After a long time of playing pretty narrative-heavy campaigns, it’s been very satisfying to get into some real serious tactical combats where we’re planning out across multiple turns to eke out a victory.

No Pasaran?

I’ve been playing a little bit of Majesty Gold HD. For being from fucking 25 years ago, honestly that game still holds up really well. It has a lot of personality for a goofy little rts/management game, what’s compelling about it though is that there are a lot of missions with different constraints and objectives and they can be pretty challenging - especially if you try to get a better time.

You have a surprisingly robust set of tools to try and get your little guys to do what you want, and the pace of the game keeps the player actively putting out fires while executing their strategy. I like that, now that I’m playing it as an adult, I can identify different builds for choosing between mutually-exclusive guilds or figuring out what build-order will work based on how aggressive the map is. There is a surprising depth to the game.

It also has some really great unit barks and sounds in general, very silly, but easily differentiated and memorable, which is great because they’re an important part of staying on top of things. e.g. Hearing a tax collector cry out as his coins spill is a clear and immediate indication that you have a hole in your security, or hearing a series of heroes yelling about how they’re running away lets you know that a significant threat has been encountered.

It’s disappointing there haven’t been many good successors to this game. The sequel is pretty widely panned with good reason. I’m aware of The Leviathan’s Fantasy, (which apparently has recently fully released? I don’t know what a release means anymore,) but at least when I was looking at it it was only partially translated and had some significant jank. I’ll probably give it a try now though. There’s also a demo out now of Crown of Greed, which looks to be a fairly faithful remake of Majesty. There’s only one demo mission now, but it felt pretty much like classic Majesty with a couple more advanced features (like flags that you can set a minimum number of heroes to rally to before they try a bounty) - not quite as much personality to it and with middling voice work though.

I think this is a pretty sick style of game and would probably work well for a lot of colony sim fans or people who like RTS campaigns. Honestly maybe the future of RTS games is less e-sport and more management hybrid. One can dream.

Still playing Dominions, but two of my games are hopefully going to wrap up soon, one I decided I’m just vibing in, and the other is still really fun. A really big tournament is coming up on Lucid’s server (369 entrants at time of writing) and I’m stoked because the first round might be really small games and have a lot of noobs to roll. Also very likely to just get rolled, but I feel pretty good about a couple of my builds at this point and I can tune at least one to be rush-focused pretty easy.

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Managed to get cities skylines 2 to stop turning my computer into the elephant’s foot by throttling the cpu to 95%. It also only usually crashes after a while except when it does right away now.

I’ve got pretty nice little city now, with what I think is a pretty natural and pleasing density gradient - mostly midrises. Spent a while to retrofit an elevated highway and interchange along one of the city’s axes and it works pretty nicely now. Not even a monstrosity except for a pretty suspect bridge and a truly terrifying merge scheme that has merges immediately before and in-line with exits.

The tools for drawing roads etc. definitely work and can achieve nice results with a little forethought, but they remain cumbersome and fiddly (especially if you have OCD). Moveit is basically indispensible as a tool to scooch things around if you want things to look a particular way.

Yeah I can totally help guide you in making a build and general strategy. I would recommend LucidTactics and his discord as a start point for learning. The game is super huge and there’s so much detail to learn, but that’s kind of what’s fun about it, but it’s also not terribly difficult to just slap a decent bless on your pretender and start playing.

Whoops. Not sure how that happened. Fixed now.

Someone was talking about Civ Beyond Earth recently and Potato Mcwhiskey was playing it so I gave it a shot - however, I pirated it and forgot to download the expansion pack at first, so I think I have had the unusual experience of playing the release version of the game and then the fully updated and expanded game back to back as my first impression. I have to say it’s crazy how much better it is. I may have gotten a particularly boring seed the first time around where I was on my own island - and the second game I’m playing on hard, but the game feels much more alive and interesting and I’ve had to actually think about the AI and what I’m trying to accomplish. I don’t know if it’s got legs and I haven’t hit endgame in the second run (it will still probably be a slog), but it’s been a pretty enjoyable civ-type experience with ayylmao characteristics. Watching my little guys shoot giant bugs in the fungal forests is definitely

What I’ve been hearing about civ 7 has gotten me a lot more optimistic about the big design changes, ages in particular. It sounds like they took a really hard look at civ’s lategame sucking because of snowballing and relative impact of decisions compared to how many you have to make and the ages system is intended to alleviate that. I imagine having fewer cities with like subordinate settlements and no workers/builders will also reduce the micro - oh! and you don’t have to manually do logistics for reinforcements anymore. remains to be seen if planes will be pleasant to use.

There’s still some interesting UIs being made.

(Highfleet, 2021)

I got a special fucking bone to pick with Cities Skylines 2. I’ve never had a game look like such vaseline-smeared ass while making my computer sound like it’s about to take off. It’s a shame because it’s definitely come a long way as a game and has some really nice buildings now, but to play it I start to get nervous after like half an hour and have to let my computer cool down, fuck that shit.

There are a surprising number of us here. Idk if your’re into multiplayer, but I have a bunch of discord servers for that if you want. It would be sick to set up a hexbear rp game, maybe I should make that happen.

the best borderlands game actually

Dominions 6 got updated so I have dipped my toe back into that absolute mess. Gonna try and take it real easy and not get into half a dozen games at once this time only to burn the fuck out.

Also been doing some Metaphor Refantazio, which is definitely an Atlus game. It’s not like it’s bad, and I am definitely having fun with it, but it’s also just so fucking stupid and anime. I kind of love that though. I do have to say that the 3d environments fucking suck and it’s sad to see that there was a lot of work put into them only for it to look like crap. Otherwise I have been enjoying how sexy all the menus are and the super fucking good battle theme with the guy chanting all crazy.

Yeah it’s good. I didn’t really like it at first, but it’s come a long way. There are things I don’t like about it, but it’s definitely fun to learn and play. Also it’s pretty easy to pick up without any experience. So yeah, check it out.

oh nice. I really loved this game and I remember liking a video by this guy about jagged alliance 2. It’ll be interesting to see if the games holds up based on this video.

Kenshi’s a lot of fun. It’s really hard to end up in a position where you really get stuck, so I enourage you to get in situations where you get captured or lose limbs.

Also make sure to avoid the wiki and tour the continent.