Holiday Break

Since I don't wish every other post to be "Didn't do anything today." I'll keep updating this post with some little things I've done and found, but I'm generally spending the time with my family and friends.

Also, Steam's Winter Sale begins on the 22nd, and alongside it the Steam Awards voting.

Games played:

• Planetside 2 - Still as good, pointless, and grindy as ever.
• Pillars of Eternity - I played this for about 4 hours, and while I have nothing inherently bad to say about it, I guess it's just my personal preferences that caused me not to like it.
  My main problem would be that it's highly complicated. Sure, the complexity adds depth, and this seems to really be a RPG in the sense that you shouldn't always try to take the "best" and easiest route, but this is not really how I've learned to play games. With so many factors to consider, I could either bore myself with trying to find the more optimal combinations, or disregard them and take the first option that seems both reasonably good and fitting to the story I'm weaving. (As I assume the game intends I do the first times.) But again, that's not how I play games.
  Further, neither the lore nor combat gripped me, and it seems that even later on it's mostly just "hit stuff until something dies". And to my friends, from whom I got this as a birthday gift, sorry I didn't like it.
• Paragon - Checked in a few months after leaving because the game was being overly simplified and the developers were impossibly incompetent with balancing some things. To my utter surprise, it had actually gotten worse, so I'm probably not going to give it another chance.
• Heroes of the Storm - Well, this still helps me remember why I don't like team-and-round-based PvP, but it's decent enough that I played it for a while. I'm actually quite happy with the direction of the updates that have been made in the year I was absent, aside from the fact that ~70% of the new heroes are Assassins.
• Long Live the Queen - Did one more playthrough, and I'm still amazed at how many different paths there are. If I don't resort to guides, there's content for another 20 hours easily.
• Typoman: Revised - So, this is a puzzle platformer with a theme of the world being composed of letters. The concept's nothing special, really. Platforming is quite standard, and the puzzles seem to mainly be figuring out in which way you should rearrange the letters given to you each scene.
  And well, it's nothing good either. In addition to there being nothing special about the platforming, the implementation of it is below average. Your character feels unresponsive and it's difficult to say where exactly you can stand. The puzzles aren't all that well thought through, as it's often unclear why the intended word is correct, while the one you made is not.
  So, in conclusion, I don't see much of a reason to play it, and I quit fairly quickly after one of the puzzles bugged out due to me dying at a wrong time.
• And also a little bit of the following: Nord Invasion, Mini Metro, Prismata

Other:
Death Note - First half was amazing. Other half was rather bad in comparison. Still good overall.
Saya no Uta - Don't even look this up. I trusted vndb's popularity ratings and thought this was a good read. Big mistake.

Games found:
Astroneer - Already very well known, but launched just a week ago. Looks like it doesn't have much content yet but people like the style.
Art of War: Red Tides - Seems to be a 3v3 PvP game that looks like an RTS, except it's a lane pusher where players choose the composition of their waves at the beginning of each wave. It's F2P, so I guess it can't hurt to try.