Also I will give disgaea, and the NIS catalog in general, credit for not really requiring engaging with this bit of the game to just beat the ‘main game’? like obviously they’re famous for all of their bonkers bullshit and max level 9999 and all, but their stories tend to end around levels like 60-80, and you can basically just play em straight usually, and i respect that.
esp cuz theyre like The Game that people think about when it comes to the rare few RPGs that actually expect you to grind, but you can usually get through the ‘main game’ without bothering! i think of the disgaea postgame of infinite item dungeons and buckwild grinding as like, a kind of guided meditation that’s drenched in anime and buttrock, and is kind of a separate experience to the ‘main game’.
Immortal Defense is a weird tower defense thingy with an odd theme where you are an nth-dimensional being etc… As far as I can tell that’s really just window dressing. Well crafted and somewhat amusingly-written but altogether not anything that special it seems like. Interesting that your mouse pointer doubles as your avatar of sorts and it automatically fires upon the nearest enemy. I think what it comes down to is I can only be briefly amused by tower-defense games most of the time so I bore of them very quickly.
Spintires has confirmed my belief that I don’t think mudcrawling in 4x4s is much fun. If I’m in a car I want to be moving at speed, not painstakingly maneuvering through difficult terrain.
Concrete Jungle is a fun little tile-laying puzzle game with a city building theme. You place different kinds of buildings (Factories, Shops, Parks, etc) which confer point bonuses/maluses to surrounding squares in different patterns, and place homes or other “point-gathering” on the appropriate square to gather points. Hitting the target number of points per column on the map clears the column and advances you toward completion of the level. Different building types also have two other aspects: their economic contribution and their building cost. The building cost meter fills up over time and when it fills completely, the target number of points for every column increases. Filling up the bar for economic contribution nets you the opportunity to get an extra type of tile to lay down as you go – helpful if you feel like a specific pattern would get you out of a bind. Cute game! I like it, but I also kinda “get it” so I’ll let my one little play session stand.
UT2004 was more interesting than I remember it being. I played it at a real actual lan party last night for 5 hours. There’s a horde map. there’s a bunchof objectives based maps and one of them has everyone flying in space ships shooting each other down for the first half of it. There is so much in this game, it’s kind of an FPS playground.
was also wild to play it on my Surface Pro 2, I remember the first computer I bought for gaming being very terrible and taking 10 minutes to load into a match
Unrest is sort of a little proto-adventure game that takes place from the perspectives of several characters before and after the king and queen of Fantasy India are killed, on the eve of a treaty being signed between the kingdom and neighboring empire who are all Nagas.
Drought and famine have fallen upon India (I forget what name the game actually calls it) and so they reach out to the Naga empire to forge a trade agreement. In the meantime, a peasant uprising happens in India and the king and queen are killed.
Now this is a really cool setting for a game, and the dialogue is pretty good too, but boy-oh-boy do I wish this had just been a regular visual novel or something because all the walking around and backtracking makes me want to go lie down. I won’t be finishing this, which is a shame because I really like the premise.
I’ve been thinking of maybe organizing something to play UT2004 with other SBers recently because I’ve been having a lot of fun with it recently but the player population is so low
it was kind of the last Quake style shooter in a lot of ways (even though it was new enough to also add Halo vehicles) before making a Quake style shooter necessitated a bunch of throwback shader shit, it pretty much runs on everything and you can drop in map packs and whatnot
it never had the cachet or the expensiveness of actual quake modding (well, sort of – quake modders wound up caring about level design fundamentals, UT modders just made a bunch of shooters with worse rules) but I think the vanilla multi experience is as good as that era ever got
though iirc tracking down native Mac binaries was pretty annoying last time I tried (I had to swap the assets into a demo app bundle?) and I think most of the places you can buy it just give you a wine version now
I remember enjoying some wild mods in the original UT, like a Dr Strangelove one where you ride your redeemer rockets around, and someone ported the entirety of the original Marathon to the engine. Was really impressive.
I remember really wanting to play ut2k4 at the time it was new but not wanting to pay money for it, I think because there was a 2k3 so I just thought “well there will always just be a better one about to come out”
I think I should stop playing any BR because I am compelled by their slot machine engineering to buy crates, skins and characters when I will likely drop the game in two weeks.
That’s the thing, Apex is the only one that’s good enough to keep you coming back after you’ve bought something! I almost didn’t play anything other than Apex last year
Taught my non-gamer friend how to play NBA Street Vol. 2 and she got so hyped and hooting and hollering that I thought the neighbors were gonna file a noise complaint