Coelacanth

Modded STALKER Anomaly is worth a shout too. Some of the weather mods and sound mods make blowouts extremely intense and impressive.

Unmodded the AI in Civ is pretty bad. On lower difficulties you can have a good time just doing your own thing if that is what you want, just building cities and infrastructure and whatnot. If you’re interested you shouldn’t be intimidated by them, I’d say. Plus you can regularly pick up Civ for like 2-3 bucks these days.

I genuinely wonder how well AC2 holds up. I remember it extremely fondly, but then again back then I didn’t have several decades of the same formula being used as a frame of reference. So I wonder how it stands on its own merits, were I to play it now.

But yeah, the whole Ezio saga was amazing at the time, and I can’t imagine they have aged too poorly.

For the longest time growing up it was Baldur’s Gate 2. Was such a formative gaming experience for me as a kid and several of those companions feel like reuniting with old friends.

More recently, Civ V on a medium difficulty is like Solitaire for me. You can just kind of go through the motions and enjoy building an empire.

For a different kind of relaxation-through-stimulation I also kind of find myself going back to Ninja Gaiden 2 recently. It’s hard to explain why this would be comforting (and the game can also be infuriating at times) but there is just something to the combat and the constant stimulation that can take your mind off things. Especially when you go back and just replay the best parts in chapter challenge as opposed to a full campaign.

Oh, this is by the CrossCode devs? I’ve heard nothing but good things about that game.

DontNod really went and created a whole new genre of game, huh? What do we call these, Teenage Simulators?

I’m sure it’s great for the target audience and I like the music selection but… I’m too old for this, I think.

Oh damn, we’ve been over this already have we not? I really suck at remembering usernames 😔

Yeah you probably need one evil lady to fill out the roster. I guess Hexxat vs Viconia is personal preference, I’m personally not a huge fan of the Beamdog companions.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about this one. Maybe I should give it a priority bump on the wishlist.

It can be a bit like that, for sure! It’s one of the spots where it shows its age I think, it was really the first western CRPG with these types of companion missions and I don’t think they had all the scripting and timings nailed down just yet.

Are you using any mods? And what’s your party composition?

That’s great, because my first read of that adage was definitely the interpretation “don’t listen to user feedback”. But then again I don’t work in game dev. Or QA. Also I’m autistic.

How are you liking BG2? It’s still one of my favourite games, even though I recognise nostalgia is a big part of it. Was one of my comfort game for years.

It’s a game where you have a grid of tiles, and if you slide one tile so that you line up 3 (or more) of the same symbol, they disappear - and you get some points, typically. Think Candy Crush, although there is multitude of other variations too.

Now, Titanium Court is a lot more than just that. It just uses the match-3 framework to riff on a sort of autobattler/tower defense roguelike gameplay loop, which works surprisingly well on a mechanical level.

That is also just the basic gameplay loop of it, however. There is a lot more to the game than that, but again all of that is best discovered first hand.

I’ve not been particularly patient this week, because I’ve been playing Titanium Court. But I will claim to get away with it because they have a 20% launch sale, so I am at least adhering to part of the patient gaming ethos: don’t buy games at full price.

I will now attempt to talk about Titanium Court without actually telling you anything about it, because this is one of those games you should go into completely blind, if possible. And also because, well… this game is not particularly easy to describe. Here goes: Titanium Court answers the question “what if David Foster Wallace made a modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a match-3 game?”. Okay, that was a little vague maybe. How about this (and knowing I’m likely to antagonise half the internet here): Titanium Court is like Undertale for adults.

It’s a game that delights in surprising you, and I recommend giving it the chance of doing so. Whether it’s a clever joke, a surprising emotional moment, a genuinely thought provoking piece of writing or a brilliant mechanical twist, the game has a lot of them in store for you. This is in my opinion a great use of the 2-hour Steam refund window policy. You will not have seen nearly everything of the game in that time, but you will almost certainly know if you vibe with it or not.

For me, this is a frontrunner for GOTY.

Sometimes I think about whether I should do a month long platforming bootcamp or something, there is such huge swath of great games I am cut off from by both struggling with and struggling to enjoy platforming. Both MIO: Memories In Orbit and REPLACED that released this year look phenomenal but… yeah. Platforming.

“Fnfnddndn” as the fentanyl hits your system?

Ah, it’s by the My Friend Pedro guy? That makes a lot of sense. I’m probably never going to touch a game that proudly extols itself as a precision platformer, but the gameplay looks great and tight if you’re into that sort of thing!

I’ve had this discussion elsewhere on here but I pretty much consider 1993 to roughly 2006-09 the golden age of PC gaming. So calling games from that era classic games is right in that ballpark for me.

There is simply no way to comply with the law under this ruling.

In such a world, the only options are to ignore it, shut down EU operations, or geoblock the EU entirely. I assume most platforms will simply ignore it—and hope that enforcement will be selective enough that they won’t face the full force of this ruling. But that’s a hell of a way to run the internet, where companies just cross their fingers and hope they don’t get picked for an enforcement action that could destroy them.

There’s a reason why the basic simplicity of Section 230 makes sense. It says “the person who creates the content that violates the law is responsible for it.” As soon as you open things up to say the companies that provide the tools for those who create the content can be liable, you’re opening up a can of worms that will create a huge mess in the long run.

That long run has arrived in the EU, and with it, quite the mess

We’re all fucked I guess.

So they just killed federated social media? Or am I misreading this whole thing? Sounds to me like they killed it.

Oh fuck me I managed to exorcise Dota from my memory like the cancerous tumor it is. Yeah that might be my most played game overall actually, across Dota 1&2.

Not that I’m suggesting you starting to play again is a bad decision or anything. I’m sure you’ll have a great time.