whatchu playing now

newb perspectives: it does a great job of creating constant tension and a feeling that you're teetering at the edge of collapse in numerous theaters at the same time. during the first several turns, even, it's like: i KNOW that iran is gonna be a thing (along with the rest of the middle east) and that access to it will help me at least get a foothold in either pakistan or india, but at the same time i can't neglect west germany because that would be a disaster, but also i need to expand into turkey so that i start to influence syria (which seems key for reaching israel, although i could also approach from saudi arabia), but oh yeah the korean war is a thing, but also establishing myself in SE asia would seem to be a good move, but....there's no way to do all of that sufficiently at the same time, so you just have to play the hand you're dealt (teehee) and be ok with holding your ground in certain areas and falling behind in others. it feels like (as the US at least) there's no way to completely dominate the early game, but there are definitely ways to completely fuck up everywhere, so it's a scramble to at least maintain a few strong areas and make sure there's at least a possibility of gaining ground in other areas later on.

goddamn what a great game, i love it

it feels like (as the US at least) there's no way to completely dominate the early game, but there are definitely ways to completely fuck up everywhere

yeah, usa early game is always v reactive ime, not just because ussr goes first but because they have a bunch of cards right off the bat that just suddenly open new fronts -- castro, vietnam, nassar -- whereas usa i think just has the us-japan defense treaty in this vein (tho because it locks down japan essentially forever this is a totally infuriating card from the ussr side whereas castro/nassar/ho can all be couped out w improbable ease) and thus doesn't have a lot of opportunity for expansion while having to be braced for containment anywhere.

the ai is not too challenging and seems pretty uncareful in choosing which of your events to play, but it beat me in one of the three games i've played so far. km otm about that played card thing which tbh seems crippling; i have the board game and know the (early- and mid-) cards pretty well but this seems like it would rightly infuriate new players. maybe we are missing something.

as almost all of a game ends up sitting at defcon 2 i enjoy the danger in certain cards (e.g. ones that play a friendly event unseen from your opponent's hand) of accidentally triggering game-ending nuclear war. a much more nervous+capricious simulation than DEFCON's slow predestined crunch. (DEFCON's mechanics rly more suited to a climate change game.)

besides this i am playing a deus ex update lol but not revision which there did not seem much point to when i tried it. this one does a little ai work instead of replacing the soundtrack (!) and tbh a little goes a long way, like uh guards notice bodies which is quite a concept, plus levels are tastefully redesigned in some neat ways. strongly recommended 2 dx heads.

the twilight struggle AI just got all tangled up in itself trying to play "destalinization" and after waiting five minutes for it to decide how to reallocate its influence i quit

yeah, it's crashed on me three times so far (playing on mac). the first was during the midwar period of the tutorial, and it was a shame because you can't save/load a tutorial game. the other two times i was able to just exit and start back at the beginning of the action round, so not a huge deal (although annoying). something kind of interesting, though, is that when i opened up the load state after both crashes, the AI repeated the same exact actions that it did before, and the same exact dice rolls occurred on their side. i remember this pretty vividly because i got really lucky with 2 poor realignment rolls by the AI, and then game crashed. I was bummed because i figured that when i started again, they'd probably win those realignment rolls. but no - they rolled poorly in the exact same way. so it seems like the rolls aren't completely random - maybe they're predetermined at the beginning of each action round? don't know.

i have completed one game, on default difficulty/influence settings. i won as the US in Turn 7, and it kind of exposed the flaws of the AI in two different ways. first, i picked up 11 victory points within just a few action rounds through a very obvious mideast Control score. i already had control of iran, iraq, saudi arabia, and halfway to israel and egypt. i got impatient and decided to just go for broke, and over the course of a few turns i just kept placing influence points on israel, played a USSR get the fuck out of egypt card (forgot the exact title), and then put more influence on libya, then the scoring card, and the game was over. if it was a human doing the same thing, it would be very obvious that they were going for some sort of mideast-specific play, because i was completely ignoring mayhem in the rest of the board. but the AI just kept going for weird little moves in south africa, even though the africa scoring card was out of play until the next reshuffle. so...that wasn't very impressive.

secondly, the AI almost always permitted the DEFCON to be at 3 or 4. as i read up on beginner strategy afterward, everyone (including DLH's post above) was saying that DEFCON is almost always at 2 the entire game. i can see why that would be true, and how it would be advantageous to the USSR to keep it at 2 (as USSR, you do a coup on action round 1, dropping the DEFCON to 2, and then US is prevented from doing coups the rest of the turn because the world will blow up at DEFCON1. at the end of the turn the DEFCON gets bumped back up to 3, the USSR gets the first action round the next turn, rinse and repeat). but the AI didn't do that.

so it's kind of a conundrum because i feel like i probably need to do several more playthroughs before attempting to play against a human. especially because i'm assuming most people playing the game this early on are people who were obsessed with the board game and have moved on to the low-maintenance computer version, so they're probably way better than i am. but i don't know how helpful it is to play against a terrible AI. i could bump up the AI's influence settings at the beginning of the game, but i don't think that would correct the other flaws in its strategy.

Stephen's Sausage Roll omg! When I started this game, I visited five or six levels and decided each one was a different variety of impossible. Since then I somehow managed to beat a handful, but the game is hair-pullingly difficult. And it's literally about rolling sausages around! which makes it seem like it's making fun of you. Sausages wtf.

Also Warbits. A challenging Advance Wars knock-off.

And Not a Hero. Dumb fun.

i really want this N64/voxel aestetic to die already

It's more of a "one person developing alone in unity and spending more time on mind-pulverizing puzzles than an 'aesthetic' " aesthetic.

Disney Crossy Road, they've added some quirks to the game play plus you get donald duck

this is probably old news but i just found this site https://isthereanydeal.com/

man, not gonna be good for the bank account

oh boy

yup, it's been around for years. good resource

See also Dealzon and Cheapassgamer

kinda loving firewatch

kinda feeling massively indifferent about the third act of firewatch

been playing the uncharted collection & nuclear throne (fun!)

i got really into StarBreak, but quit after getting disconnected from the servers became a constant thing. still, i'll probably check back in if/when they get that fixed. RIYL if you like Realms of the Mad God (think it shares one of the same designers, even)

i could not figure out what was enjoyable about rotmg and i tried a bunch

yeah, it's not for everyone. it's kind of relaxing in a way, just being part of a swarm. StarBreak is a 2D contra-style platformer version of it.

also ponyisland is v. frog fractions esque and worth checking out imo

finished uncharted I started uncharted II - from the opening it's obviously a significantly better game than the first which i had to force myself to finish. picked up stellaris and looking forward to giving it a try. nuclear throne is still addictive as hell. pony island was fun as heck and i highly recommend.

man pony island was not fun. it was 'ok this is kinda neat'

aw, i liked it.

heartily loving the first two episodes of the new hitman game, don't even feel stupid for giving them all the money, blew up an Italian with a golf ball last night

Doom a hoot

ok, playing some ninja gaiden (NES) over at https://www.twitch.tv/weinventyou

hate those birds. you should play hyper light drifter if you haven't already!

I want Doom and overwatch and 12 hours a day I can game.

I am playing dark souls 2 and trying to pursuade my wife that buying a ps4 is more important than fixing the plumbing.

nuclear throne is kinda a minor classic btw

depends on what plumbing imo

man, i could reliably get to 6-3 in ninja gaiden, but i would always die at the spot right before the boss. if not there, then on the boss, or one of the two bosses you have to fight in a row after that. i think i got to the final one once, but never beat the game. still one of my favorites ever. that music!

uncharted 4, doom, diablo 3 for some reason.

all while i break from dark souls 3 which is probably calling me for a second character already

xp - i was so hooked on nuclear throne over the winter, had to stop cold turkey. watching youtubes of it has been the most humbling experience of the twitch era for me so far.

if you have ios, any interest in strategy games, and little interest in your life this weekend, run to the app store right now to buy imbroglio. some talk on tooch thread.

vampire the masquerade: bloodlines (modded up and w/ steam controller) -- atmosphere galore, pleasantly sleazy, elegant+robust stats system, unexpected and genuinely scary haunted house section, terrible combat.

DOOM (2016) -- at least one upgrade system too many, but has the alchemy: continues to function as ultraviolent power fantasy even as it kills me dozens of times in the same place.

DOOM II -- these maps! the formal ambition, and the taxing confidence in the audience, of someone's "late style".

the witcher 2: assassins of kings -- what happened to me is i beat the first one so now i feel invested in this stupid bullshit and can't just skip to the one everyone likes. witcher 1 was no triumph of elegant minimalism in crpg uis but this one may actually have the worst inventory interface i've ever seen? every time i open it up i'd say there's a 40% chance i accidentally take off my pants.

unreal tournament -- so conservative it could be a kickstarter project -- they even kept the biorifle, hardly a hallowed piece of fps weapon design -- but if it were a kickstarter project the aging, grumpy player base (hi) would presumably act even more entitled than they do now. neither as good as the original nor different from it in a single meaningful way, so hard to recommend to those for whom its existence isn't recommendation enough, but very pretty and not a betrayal.

subnautica -- my go-to oculus demo: a standard post-minecraft survival game of the kind that now seems to be most of steam, but in the (alien, cartoony) ocean. can't play it that often, at least not with the thing on my head, cuz it scares me -- the 360-degree vulnerability; the distant groans of vast, unseen fauna. mostly play it as an environment, not a game, but wish i had the patience to craft myself a submarine or whatever. (would be less scared if i had a submarine.)

never got past 6-3 in ninja gaiden either, usually died in 6-2 anyways

renowned explorers - my 6th rated game for last year - has new dlc out today:

This expansion pack for Renowned Explorers has one goal: giving you More To Explore! The main features are:

Two complete new expeditions: the Andean Adventure & The Lost Island.
The Campfire mechanic: crew relationships, back stories and game-changing upgrades.
Treasure Bonus Choices, turning treasures into surprises that boost your strategy.

I have downloaded total war: warhammer (which should obv have been called total warhammer) and have got back in touch with people I played actual warhammer with when I was 11 to play it with

much more fun than I was expecting tbh

Grabbed Dangerous Golf on launch today before seeing any reviews, because how could an indoor smash-as-much-as-you-can golf game by the guys who made burnout be anything but great, right?

Well, it's not great. It's the most unpolished game I've seen in YEARS, and 5 or 6 stages in I've hit a point of "wait I'm not even sure what the game wants me to do here" - just smashing stuff isn't it, apparently, they've hidden the hole and it's really unclear what I need to do to find it again (but it won't let me progress until I do).

So that's a big disappointment.

Am flagging on Doom. Might have to tick down the difficulty by one. Don't feel comfortable with that.

lol guess what game I'm playing

http://i.imgur.com/9eRt0Vv.jpg

Fifa 97!

tried the doom demo. the controls seem really basic but i guess thats a good thing. looks nice n smooth but i'll probably wait for price drop. also doing the latest witcher 3 dlc

OG Doom and Doom II and Duke Nukem 3D and Star Wars: Dark Forces. God damn ID for never porting Quake to PS3 or Vita. God damn them to hell.

assassin's creed: black flag

the controls seem really basic

what are you looking for, the crafting interface

(wise to wait for a price drop i think; it's a complete blast but the multiplayer's kind of a feint so it's a single-player game you almost certainly won't play through more than twice and i doubt that's a $60 value.)

didnt mean it as a complaint, its more just being used to destiny since i don't do fps much

it's bethesda so i expect to be able to grab it for $15 by the end of the year

http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/Yahoo/ept_sports_fantasy_experts-378688165-1224777141.jpg