27.05.17

Exams are now in full swing, and so I have missed another week of posting.

I have 3 more weeks of these, then I'm free for the two and a half months of summer. So I'm estimating I'll be mentioning my game-related doings (as many or few as have accumulated over the week) on the next three Saturdays, but not the days between them, as to avoid the majority being a list of reasons why I, yet again, didn't have time.

For the past two summers now, I've set myself the goal of actually making it completely through my games list. While I've made significant progress both times, I haven't actually gotten close to finishing either time. Why that is continues to elude me, as I can't remember what the hell I spent a summer's worth of time on. At least this time around I'll have written evidence.

But for today, here's four new games I found.

Oxygen Not Included - Oh, this one's quite popular. I'm not sure if it was in poor condition the last time around or if I didn't take a proper look at it, but it was on my "Not Interested" list. Might have been the non-serious-looking graphics. Apparently it's a 2D base-building game inside asteroids. So you have to manage all your resources very carefully, making sure you don't let anything go to waste due to the limited amount available. Especially the oxygen. But that's just what it looks like, I haven't played it. But since it does look interesting, I will eventually.

Mages of Mystralia is an action-adventure game. Plenty of that genre around these days, but this one's slightly more popular, and the spell-crafting system caught my eye. So as you can assume, there's magic involved, but beyond that, I can't much guess what it's about.

Willy-Nilly Knight is some sort of RPG that boasts an isometric view, real-time gameplay, and yet turn-based combat. I can't help but notice a lot of other things here also really remind me of a certain game named Divinity. I mean, Divinity was good. Still is good, as I regrettably haven't finished Original Sin yet despite the second one launching mid-September. And I have nothing against a game similar to it, as long as that game also carries its own ideas, because I really doubt it can do the exact same thing better. But, I'll see how it is when I get around to it.
And finally, Nongünz. It's an action-platformer-roguelike, but also a shooter. I love it how sometimes you can just mash together a few genre names and give a pretty good idea of what kind of game something is. It also has duochrome (not a real word meaning only two shades of color as opposed to the single shade of monochrome) pixel art graphics, which look quite nice. I just hope it won't have the same problems with it as Butcher did.

I've actually mostly been playing Stellaris during the patches of free time I've had in the past week, after acquiring it from the latest Humble Monthly. I'm surprised I haven't written a word about it on this blog, but since I'm nowhere near doing a fresh start with it, I won't write anything lengthy on it. It's noticeably improved since I last played it, and it seems the updates (free and otherwise) are still being deployed quite often. A lot of the more "objective" complaints of mine have been quelled, but what remain are still the issues I personally have with it, yet can't fault to the game. Most of them have to do with the fact that I'm playing Stellaris like a turn-based game, while in reality it's an RTS. Two of the more prominent ones being:

I can't micromanage all my planets, but am instead forced to leave the vast majority into sectors and let the braindead AI make terrible decisions. Of course, as an RTS, I probably wouldn't have the time to micro 20-50 planets, but... yeah...

And secondly, stuff happens at an inconsistent pace. That's kind of vague, but I can really have lengthy periods of fuck all happening except for the void slowly lulling me to sleep. Or I can have like five things requiring my extensive attention all at once all of a sudden. I imagine this has something do with the fact that if I pause, then do all the things, they tend to also finish in clumps, whereas if I did them as I had time to get around to them, they'd also finish at a more staggered pace.

So if you like strategy games, but don't want the real-time aspect rushing you on, maybe try the recently launched Endless Space 2. Or if you instead want to get over the habit of pausing, get some friends and play multiplayer. Pausing at every convenient moment isn't really plausible there. As for me, I probably won't really play it anymore. At least not in singleplayer.