I really like how the web serial Sideways in Hyperspace handles this problem.
In short, the faster ships catch up with the slower generation ships, facilitating trade, arranging transport for those who want to leave, and allowing them to become extrasolar cities and stepping stones to the wider galaxy.
CHLOE YES!
Tunic is a solid 10-15 hour adventure game, and I highly recommend playing without spoilers as several experiences are information-locked like Outer Wilds. It's an isometric adventure game heavily inspired by Zelda with some Souls influence bleeding into the lore, mechanics, and boss fights. Replayability is limited to speedrunning and challenge runs.
Bastion is a wonderful adventure game with a heavy focus on combat. It's a precursor to Hades from the same developer, and shares the same mechanical DNA minus the rogue-lite elements that Hades introduced. The followup game, Transistor, is also worth checking out, though it didn't quite hit the same highs for me as Bastion. Both are 10-20 hour adventures with limited replayability if you want to achievement hunt.
More games to check out:
Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2
Journey, Abzu, and The Pathless
Subnautica
It's a toss up.
My favorite time was when I tried to pour myself a bowl of cereal. Got the bowl, milk, and cereal out. Poured the cereal into the milk jug. Put away the milk, cereal, and bowl. Walked away for some reason. Came back and couldn't find the bowl of cereal I just made. Looked all over for it. Finally gave up and got the milk, bowl, and cereal out to try again. Poured the cereal into the bowl this time. Poured the milk. Cereal is coming out of the milk jug. Suddenly flash back to a few minutes ago when I was picking up spilled cereal off the counter and shoving it into the milk jug because it missed when I tried to pour.
The worst time I was so sleep-deprived that I managed to throw some trash in the toilet and then I peed in the trash can.
Firewatch was a recent purchase for me which I mildly regret.
As a walking simulator it's wholly dependent on the quality of its story, and the quality just isn't there. It starts strong but the ending is rushed and without a coherent resolution. It does so much work to set up multiple dramatic mysteries and then haphazardly solves half of them out of nowhere and forgets the rest in the final scramble to finish.
Nice graphics. Great voice acting. Neat concept. Needed more time to cook and left me feeling like I wasted my time getting invested in the story.
A recent release? Diablo 4 I guess. I don't really regret it since I knew what I was in for. I bought it to play with my best friend, and we had fun together until he got bored and frustrated. My hopes were high but my expectations were minimal and it still barely managed to meet them.
Gave Valheim another shot.
The last couple times I've tried it I struggled picking up momentum and progressing in the game, as the initial tutorial seems to be missing a few key steps so I end up spinning my wheels not knowing what to do next.
This time I had Christmas break time to fuck around and find out. Pushed through the initial hurdles and actually made decent progress, including soloing the first boss. It's a solid game so far, but it could communicate its expectations a bit more clearly.
I picked up Monster Hunter World again last night after playing some Dark Souls Remastered and itching for more of that style combat. I forgot how much better it was than Rise, and I never got around to playing Iceborne. Having a lot of fun with the new stuff, and I think it'll be my default game this week.
Hidden games hides them from you, in your own library.
Just beat Factorio (launched a rocket) for the first time a couple of days ago. Feels good.
Default settings, and I got the Lazy Bastard, no lasers, no solar, no provider/buffer/requestor chests, and SLaTfAtF achievements in one go after about 80 hours in.
Continuing the Factory for now to farm the 20m Green Circuit production achievement. Slowly transitioning from a main bus factory to a city blocks factory. Blue circuits are my bottleneck, so I'm working on scaling up production off-bus.
Planning to go for the speedrun achievements next weekend. Want to 100% the game before the new expansion they've been teasing drops.
The factory must grow.
Best:
Factorio - The factory must grow.
Vampire Survivors - They keep releasing new content, and I keep devouring it. This game is even more addicting than Cracktorio.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog - Best April Fools joke this year, and a solid light visual novel in its own right. This was a pleasant surprise.
Remnant II - My choice for Game of the Year this year. TotK let me down, and while BG3 is solidly in the #2 spot I don't really vibe with it. Remnant II is an excellent sequel that builds on the strengths while fixing the weaknesses of its predecessor. It's a hell of a game that still manages to stand out in a year stacked with great titles.
Note: I didn't play AC6 or the new Street Fighter, so I've got no opinion on how they match up.
Worst:
Keywe - A puzzle game where you play as Kiwi birds managing a post office in Australia. Not my thing, but my sister likes it and wanted to play the multiplayer with me. We played online and holy hell this game's netcode is broken. We kept desyncing mid-puzzle and then whoever was hosting would have to finish the puzzle while the other stood and watched because they couldn't see the actual gamestate. It's probably a fine game as a solo or local play experience, but it left a sour impression.
I heard they quietly dropped that as their motto several years ago.
Outer Wilds and Hollow Knight share the spotlight for greatest games of all time. Both are as close to perfect as it gets.
Bastion gets an honorable mention. Not sure if SuperGiant Games is considered indie anymore, especially now that Hades hit big, but I love their early work.
Just above the cast, write on your foot:
WRON
FOO
Quad9 seems perfect for me! I'll give it a shot.
Thank you!
How much time have you spent being single?
Most of my life. I've had two serious relationships and one complicated one, none lasting more than six months. My last relationship ended in late 2019, so it's been 4.5 years. I'm 33 this year, and have been single for about 31 years total.
If you’re currently single: is it by choice or circumstance?
Bit of both. I choose not to invest my time, money, and energy into pursuing a relationship, but sometimes that choice feels forced because I don't have enough time, money, or energy to spare for pursuing a relationship. If it happens, it happens, but I'm not proactive about it because I'm focusing on work and my hobbies. If I ever find myself financially stable without working full time I might have time to actively pursue a relationship, but that's not in the cards right now for my autistic ass. I spend almost all my free time recovering so I can go back to work.
I joined a LARP community and I go to board game and DnD meetups specifically to meet people and keep my social muscles healthy. Hopefully I'll find a partner in those circles someday, but no luck so far. The unfortunate reality is that every girl I meet is already in a relationship. I have made a lot of friends, so mission accomplished as far as that goes, but the folks who say that joining hobby groups and hanging out with people who share your interests is the best way to find a partner are full of shit.
Finally, both of my serious relationships ended on good terms because my partner felt I did not communicate enough with them, while I felt the amount of communication they were expecting was too much for me to maintain, which made the relationship a source of stress and anxiety for me. We broke it off, and I'm still good friends with one of them. This is a problem with me that I'm not sure how to fix, and it's very much not conducive to a healthy relationship. I hope I can find a partner who's comfortable with that some day, but it's made me leery of jumping into new relationships.
Do you / did you enjoy single life?
No, but I don't enjoy dating life, either. Life in general is an unending stream of demands, and I never get enough time to stop, breath, and reset. That's true while I'm single, and it was true while I was dating.
What are / were the pros and cons?
Pros:
Cons:
Porn addiction. I have a high sex drive, no healthy outlet for it, and it's an easy dopamine hit for stress and anxiety relief.
Financial stress. I'm barely getting by on a single income.
Constantly questioning my identity. I think I'm some flavor of aromantic sex-positive asexual, and I suspect I'm bi and/or trans, but I've got no partner to explore my own gender and sexuality with. It's hard to tell how much is real and how much is my mind spinning off the rails with nothing to latch on to.
Is / was partnership a goal of yours?
Yes. I'd like to settle down with a fellow introvert so we can be alone together.
Bunch of games on my Steam wishlist I'm mildly interested in but not willing to pay more than about $10 for, since they'd just wind up sitting in my backlog until I have time to play them. Waiting for a steep sale.
Some of the highlights:
Cassette Beasts
Sonic Frontiers
Cyberpunk 2077
Red Dead Redemption 2
Dark Souls III
Edit: Didn't see the "year ago or older" caveat in the title.
Minish Cap was my first Zelda. I remember using my allowance to buy the strategy guide back in the day so I could 100% it. Lots of nostalgia there.
Picked up The Longing, and I've been working my way through it little by little.
Excellent game. Way more depth and much better paced than I anticipated. It's an idle game that commits to the bit. Fire it up, wait 400 days, and you're done. There's other stuff to do within the game, but it all takes time, and it's all optional but pleasantly engaging.
I give my little shade a task, then let it run in the background while I do other things, and now I'm suddenly 8000 words in to writing some fan fiction I've been bouncing around in my head. It's been a very productive week.
Just finished Subnautica for the first time. That was a hell of a satisfying ending. Good game throughout.
Picked Factorio back up for now. Making another go at it on a fresh start. Maybe this time I'll push through and actually launch a rocket.
Just finished 100%ing all achievements in Factorio. Got the speedrun achievements over the weekend, and let my original factory run overnight for a few days to grind out the 20m green circuits.
Still got the itch to play more factory sim. Debating whether to dip my toes into Dyson Sphere Program or try my hand at the Space Exploration mod for Factorio.
Thanks. That's good to know. Cloudflare will be the next one I try if Quad9 gives me any problems.
So far I've picked up:
Having a blast with Balatro to the exclusion of all else.
I find Subnautica has less replayability than other survival games since the map and questline is static. Once you know where everything is and you've seen all the plot beats there's not much reason to play the game again unless you want to challenge yourself with a speedrun or, as you said, one of the harder difficulties.
I wouldn't consider creative mode or sandbox mode to be a core part of the game. They're great for fucking around or as an extended tutorial, but I see them more as external tools than as part of the game experience proper.
For me my issues with Rise are two-fold.
One, it's because it was designed for the Switch and based off the handheld version of the game, so they were working under stricter hardware limitations and could afford to sacrifice fidelity. This felt like a step backwards after we were spoiled by how detailed and vibrant World felt. The environments just felt more artificial and "gamey" where World felt like an actual place with real creatures interacting with each other in believable ways.
Two, it's because I don't much like the wire-bugs. They feel out of place in Monster Hunter because they're just a bit too OP and magical. I'm not a fan of the more fantastical elements MH has been introducing. I like the series being more grounded, and I felt World hit the balance nicely with the weapons and tools being fun and "anime" without being so over the top they break verisimilitude.
Both are minor complaints. Rise is still a great game and I did play it for a good while on the Switch, it's just not scratching the MH itch like World does.
Firewatch has been on the periphery of my attention for a while. I've heard generally good things about it, but it didn't actually pique my interest until Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe ::: spoiler spoiler swapped it in to replace Minecraft in the alternate games ending. :::
I figured if it was good enough for the Stanley Parable devs to feel it was worth referencing, it must have been an indie gem that I was sleeping on. I was wrong.
Hades would be my choice if you're looking to be challenged. Give it a few tries on normal difficulty, and if you're getting your ass kicked it has a great casual friendly accessibility option to turn on a slowly scaling damage reduction that will eventually tune the game to your skill level. You can turn it off at any time, and there are no penalties for using it.
Psychonauts 2 is also a solid choice. Overall it was an excellent sequel and definitely worth playing, but if you're looking for a challenge look elsewhere. It's a casual platformer through and through. It's still a great game in it's own right, though IMO it doesn't take as many risks as the original Psychonauts and didn't quite hit the same emotional highs.
In a bit of a gaming rut right now. Spinning my wheels on a bunch of different games. Haven't had one hook its claws back into me yet.
I've been mostly grinding out Cookie Clicker and Slay the Spire this week.
Nice games to play side by side while I binge blind Let's Plays of Hollow Knight, Outer Wilds, and Return of the Obra Dinn so I can vicariously chase the fleeting joy and wonder I got from playing those games the first time around.
Finished most of the tasks to do in The Longing and now just waiting for the clock to tick down.
Sat down one evening with my old save file and pushed through to finish the Tears of the Kingdom main quest. For all its faults, it had a really strong ending. I cried. Very conflicted on the game, but I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said ad nauseum.
Played a bit of Dark Souls, a bit of Sekiro, a bit of Kingdoms of Amalur, a bit of Subnautica: Below Zero, and a bit of Siralim. Not sure what I'll settle on yet for next week, but I'm feeling strongest on Siralim right now.
I'll back up that Civ 4 has been the best entry in the series so far.
Civ 5 is when they dropped unit stacking, which made combat much slower and more finicky since you couldn't just build up a massive deathball and tear across the map, and Civ 6 doubled down on that design space by tying city upgrades to individual tiles as well. They're not bad changes, and they do add more strategic depth to the combat and city-building, but they do make an already slow game substantially slower, since combats that used to be done in a turn or two now require several turns of rotating and repositioning units to get them in and out of the fight.
Civ 4 was the last "pure" civ experience, building off and adding to the previous games without sweeping mechanical changes to shake up the meta.
I use it daily for connecting it to my car stereo, and about once a month when I mow my lawn or have to fly on a plane. I'll never buy a phone without one.
I prefer wired headphones. I don't want to worry about keeping them charged, and the few pairs of wireless headphones I have tried died or had the buttons stop working after a few uses from getting waterlogged with sweat, while I've been using the same pair of $6 wired headphones for 10 years without issues.
I don't care for Bluetooth or USB audio connections as they don't always work intuitively, they might take multiple button presses to set up, and every manufacturer seems to think they need to be set up in a slightly different way, while the auxiliary audio cable just works with no setup.
I'm still playing PalWorld, but Cassette Beasts is on my short list now by that same logic.
Dust is great, but it's deeply flawed.
The art is phenomenal, but the writing is cringeworthy. I loved it as a teenager but I have a hard time taking it seriously now. I wish I never replayed it so I could have kept my nostalgia.
The combat mechanics are fun and feel amazing when played as intended, but they're massively unbalanced. IIRC with two exceptions (enemies that require a parry to enter a vulnerable state) every single fight can be won flawlessly by spamming Dust Storm even on the highest difficulty.
It's a remarkable game, all the more so since it was only one dev. I 100%'ed it, and it sits in a place of honor in my collection, but it's not one I'll ever return to.
HL being in bland is less about it being bland and more a statement about how bad bad the games that made the bad list actually were.
I'm not your Pal, Friend!
I just started and I'm having fun with it so far! Playing a mage and just unlocked my first specialization. Went with the one that gives meteor.
I think I soft-locked my save while I was having disconnect issues. I can't leave the area anymore at all. Contemplating starting over. I'm not too far in yet. GW2 and PoE are running fine now, but LE is crashing every time I try to exit the end of time zone without fail.
One of my Discord servers changed all the channel names for the day.
Nothing else so far. It's been quiet.
I wanted more Vampire Survivors content when I've already finished Vampire Survivors. I just discovered that Survivors is a genre now, and there's a ton of copycat games of varying quality. I'm poking around looking for good ones.
Picked up Spellbook: Demon Slayers because it was a $5 game on sale for a dollar off. It's still in early access, and that shows. It's clearly unfinished but it's got good bones.
Pros: Solid mechanics. Solid variety of spells and builds. Nice variety of endgame and meta progression systems with a reasonable amount of grinding.
Cons: Only three indistinguishable maps, limited enemy variety, and I'm not a fan of the endgame being effectively gated by farming endless mode. I like Vampire Survivors having games effectively limited to 15-30min sessions with all content doable within those constraints, endless mode optional, making time commitments much more predictable and reliable. Spellbook: Demon Slayers is much less respectful of your time.
Still, promising game overall. Solid 6/10 as-is, with a tentative 8-9/10 if the devs can follow through to a finished product. Looking forward to future development. Would love recommendations for other games in the genre that scratch that itch.
NG+ is optional since it's not required to finish the game or appreciate the story. It's there for the challenge.
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I'm 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I'm pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Agreed. The art looks straight out of an anime, and Dust's combat animations are really smooth and satisfying. I think the cutscenes looked really good, too, but it's been long enough that I don't remember.
Farming? Really? Man of your talents?