Games You Played Today Classic Mini

(eta: caveat that the game actually looks better than this. i was using the debug mode which, for whatever reason, doesn’t apply all of the shaders to the models so they look a bit worse than usual)

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Games I Did Not Play Today: Artifact

As a jobless degenerate trader, I survived an 84% bitcoin decline throughout 2018 with a smile on my face and livable profits secured by the end… and I still was not emotionally prepared to handle Artifact’s utter astonishing failure. It’s been 40 days since Valve did or said anything, we have nothing to go on for their plans for the game and responses to criticism other than “we’re in it for the long haul”, and every plausible-seeming day on the calendar I get worked up with anticipation that today might be the day they finally drop the patch and save the game somehow!!… and Valve Time continues to pass in silence.

I don’t even know how they could save the game at this point other than literally paying people to play it, which frankly could happen.

It’s a reality check that bounced. I doubled down and bought another full playset around $75 and it continues to plunge.

I enjoy playing the game every now and then though!

edit: hype for next month’s Hearthstone set rotation too! I’m gonna invent my own top-tier deck finally and watch it go meta!

edit 2: oh yeah, and this happened: Richard Garfield (the game’s designer) is no longer at Valve

pretty normal for contract work but this quote just slays me

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Don’t worry, bitcoin is going to explode again soon. I read it on the internet so it must be true

Artifact on the other hand…

You know how valve is, they aren’t exactly the masters of communication

i played some of the alpha build of a game called Satisfactory which is going for the “factorio but first-person and in 3d space” market. it was a lot of wandering around a green and verdant field and then walking up to grey imposing desks and grinders in order to open grey imposing UI elements to put stuff in. i did like the little cartoon intro they had but the vaguely omnipresent “isn’t colonialism funny” angle that it has is kinda wearing. the designs of the creatures were cool though. kinda ferret-armadillos and big walking walrus bodies on long thin legs. made me reluctant to zap them with the first item the game gives you, a cattle-prod-lookin-thing called the “xeno zapper”. writing not its strong point. gameplay could be interesting though! depends if i ever go back to it or not.

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I’ve seen this described as Subnautica + Factorio

Subterranio

It’s latent in Factorio itself, although that game quietly has a much more nuanced take on it. Factorio leaves open “funny” as only one possible attitude players may take to clear-cutting forests using grenades and then killing the natives after they dare to get angry about it. It doesn’t have any text about it and just lets the theme emerge from the mechanics, incentives and aesthetics.

Here’s one things the Factorio devs have recently posted about biters. I also suspect the resemblance to Starship Troopers aliens is deliberate.

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it would be cool if there was a sim / building game like this where instead of playing the colonizing / industrializing / harvesting force you were in control of some kind of sentient spirit of nature that could like command plants and animals to turn up and wreck shit, reclaim the land

trying to think of some kind of game systems based around natural processes rather than like putting different geometric shapes together would also be pretty cool

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Dungeon Keeper, kinda?

From Dust?

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There’s a board game called Spirit Island that I think is exactly this. I’d really like to try it sometime, looks pretty cool.

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yeah, dungeon keeper except with plant vines growing into gears and like squirrels biting people in the butt and stuff

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hey play Waking Mars its a game about learning alien ecologies and nurturing life

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My partner pointed out when I linked her that Factorio blog post that it reminded her of Princess Mononoke.

For that matter, the majority of Ghibli films vaguely circle a “revenge of nature/tradition/the ancient” theme in some form. Although only in the earliest Ghibli films (Nausicaa and Laputa) does nature actually win – nature barely clings to existence in the margins in every film starting from Totoro. I guess that means Miyazaki, in a way, got more and more cynical over time in his true message at the same time as he moved away from the surface-level darkness of Nausicaa.

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oh yeah in my version of this game the big morality choice at the end would be do you send down the gigantic elk god or swarm of gargantuan armored insects to destroy all vestiges of humanity, or do you let human civilization continue in some kind of hunter gatherer fashion in harmony with the world

it would be great

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That’s kind of just inverting the aesthetic coding of the colonizing game though, right?

There are quite a few games that position humans as victims of beings with different values: Universal Paperclips, Katamari Damacy, Goat Simulator and many Godzilla and Martian-invasion themed games. Of those, Goat Simulator and Godzilla games are the ones that don’t project Western civilization behavior onto alien beings, because A) they behave according to strange whims rather than a maximalist agenda, and B) like nature’s real-life disasters, they kill individuals and then withdraw.

Another twist on this that might avoid anthropomorphizing (or “capitalomorphizing”) nature would be a post-apocalyptic gardening game. Humanity has wiped itself out and the player’s task is to overgrow the ruins over hundreds of years.

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I recently completed Atelier Meruru, which is pretty much about a princess going around murdering carrot-wielding bunnies to clear the land for her kingdom’s development plans.
There’s even a dungeon that is basically a giant walking tree God who you have to kill to gain 100 dev points, but I failed to do that so nature won that round, I guess

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The thing with nausicaa is that if you read the manga it turns out the fungal jungle that is purifying the land is actually man made, because by that point Miyazaki felt that phenomenon being naturally occurring was a little too optimistic

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It’s a board game tho, Spirit Island edit: like OneSecondBefore said

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I started playing forza horizon 4 today

everyone looks and sounds like a douchebag. you have like 3 people talking to you all the time. you can change your clothing, by which I mean you can pick between 14 different skinny jeans. no matter what you do everyone says you are awesome. at least 4 different times someone told me HEY KEEP DRIVING LIKE THAT AND YOU CAN X WHERE X IS SOMETHING COOL YOU WANT TO DO. one time I finished dead last in a race and they all said this to me

everything gives you points. there are several different kinds of points. crashing into a wall gives you points. before and after every event there is a little pointless cutscene of your car spinning around in a white void with your douchebag avatar posing around it for no reason. you can buy fortnite dances.

it is so obnoxiously AAA video game it makes me want to vomit

you set your license plate at the beginning of the game, for reasons. I set mine to FUCKYOU. they told me I couldn’t do that. probably they reported me to the FBI

right before I set my license plate the game knew my name. like, my real name. like, it audibly says my real name whenever it refers to me. what the fuck kind of voodoo is this shit.

I’m using a wheel. I’m new to using a wheel. like a cool person, I turned off every assist and looked up wheel setting from a Pro Racing Dude to use. it’s not nearly as hard as, like, a real racing game. of course. but it’s also not structured like a real racing game; you’re constantly in new places doing new races, so you’re never familiar with your surroundings. that’s not exactly how you want things to go when you’re racing with zero assists in cockpit mode on a wheel. when you suck. but I don’t care, because it’s cool.

the game runs exceptionally well. it’s not as pretty as I had been led to believe, but it’s good enough.

this game is pretty fun

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True, the presentation is pretty douchey. The game kicks ass though.