I found Patron and Farthest Frontier to be better in that genre than Settlement Survival. Of course, Banished is still the gold standard.
I started Zelda Echoes of Wisdom on the switch this past weekend and am enjoying it. It definitely has a good bit of older Zelda games feel, but there’s also a smidge of the open world feel - not as open world as BOTW and TOTK, but I also haven’t run into major restrictions that keep me tied to a specific story path.
I’ve been playing the hell out of Batman: Arkham City in the Return to Arkham collection on PS4. Today, with a kitty on me most of the morning and part of the afternoon, I got a three-medal score finally with Batman on the Endurance Round of the Riddler Combat Challenge, and I got a decently high score with all four characters on the Joker Challenge, where you bank your points and get more time - but I haven’t gotten any medals yet.
theres just too much pickniess like i have a hugm mountain that has a gem marker on it and can get one of their mines to fit on it …hell no and I tried for hours … and the tech trees are weird …
ok try again lol
there’s just too much pickiness like I have a huge mountain with a gem marker on it and I can’t get one of their mines to fit on it …hell no and I tried for hours … and the tech trees are weird …
I’ve played it a little so far and love the direction they went with it.
I bought a much-needed external hard drive for my PS4, which came with a 14-day free trial of PlayStation Plus.
I got WWE 2K24 and Street Fighter V free with PS Plus.
WWE 2K24 s the best wrestling game ever.
And Street Fighter V is so deep. The ultimate love letter for SF fans.
Now that I’ve upgraded my PC I gave Star Citizen another try. It runs 95% better now, still a little buggy at times but graphics are really nice and performance is playable.
I’ve been trying to figure out the gear system, took a job to deliver 5 crates but never could figure out how to load them into my ship. I got the ship and the crates in the same hangar, but could not move them.
Turns out you need a multitool with tractor beam attachment to do that. I failed at getting that to work, I suspect because I never outfiitted myself properly with armor and a backpack so my character would not carry/store the multitool and the tractor beam so I could combine them.
I then took pickup/delivery job that I was pretty sure was just one crate that I could carry, and it was. Only problem was I wasn’t wearing suitable gear and the planet where I landed for the pickup was like -165c. I sprinted into the building airlock and survived to pick up the package, but when sprinting back to my ship I died because the steps were being wonky and I couldn’t get in.
Next attempt when I was delivering it was to a really pitch facility on the night side of a planet and I managed to crash my ship. I gave up for that session.
Last night I was able to complete that delivery mission, properly kitted out in some basic armor, backpack, and a helmet. And I completed another after that.
So there is a lot to learn and some bugs, but Star Citizen is sloooowly coming along. One cool thing about it is you can do everything with other players if you choose, and I still like the ship modeling, the planets, and the seamless transition from planet to space and back.
I broke down and bought Black Myth Wukong. The only possible complaint I can come up with is the motion capture/programming for mouth movements has gotten so good that the English voice acting is just like the dubbing for Chinese movies - it’s off, and it bugs me.
Definitely a souls-like game in difficulty, but less punishing. As far as I can tell, the only downside to death is going back to your last-touched spawn point - no losing experience or currency. Progress feels fairly straightforward, though I’ve found myself getting a bit lost at times.
Has anyone played They Are Billions? I always thought it was a tower defense game, but I recently saw some gameplay videos and it looks like it might be more of an RTS game?
The first DLC for The Planet Crafter has been released today: Planet Humble.
The planet is about half the size, but new biomes and techniques (example: you have to refine some ores to get minerals).
Metaphor Re: Fantazio is the game I most want to play now. My graphics card blew on my computer and I only have a Switch.
Anyone know someone with a PS4 they don’t want?
I really want to play it.
I’ve played They Are Billions quite a bit. It’s both RTS and tower defense. The base building stuff is pretty standard RTS - placing farms, houses, barracks, and so forth. But instead of another “player” (AI or real) building their own base, your opponent is a zombie horde. The map is filled with zombies that will attack your scouts if they get too close, but also can wander into your settlement if you’re not protecting your borders. This can quickly lead to disaster, as (in proper zombie fashion) every time a zombie kills one of your workers, it becomes a zombie. One lone zombie getting into your housing when you’re not paying attention can bring your run to a quick end.
On top of the map full of random zombies, 3 - 4 times a game a zombie horde shows up, with a giant horde at the very end as the win condition for the scenario. So you need to balance building up your settlement, exploring the map, and preparing for the next horde, while also making sure the random shamblers don’t wander in.
It’s a really solid game loop. A lot of hair-pulling when you miss a small gap in your walls, and your colony gets wiped out, but it pays off when those Tesla coils discharge and disintegrate two hundred zombies that were clawing at your walls.
I highly recommend it.
I’m in the midst of what I hope will eventually be a relaxing vacation, and I never saw this coming, but I’ve gotten into the old Bard’s Tale trilogy again. Not the remastered Steam release, the old school 80’s games for the old computer systems. Just finished the second game and intend to get started on the third today.
First off, a word about the trilogy for those of you who didn’t play classic computer games. It is, on the whole, quite possibly the most obscene pile of crap EA has released, ever. That they charged real money for these crimes against sanity is downright disgraceful. It’s as if the design team got a dare to put every single negative aspect of roleplaying games into a single product. The level grinding is soul-deadening, the constant attacks springing out of nowhere are nerve-fraying, and every single aspect of combat hinging on [insert “LUCK” 25d4 times] is infuriating… and that’s street level. Once you start dungeon delving, the real agony fun begins, with traps and antimagic zones and spinners and teleporters and silence zones and darkness zones (frigging darkness zones) thrown all over the goddam place, along with the occasional instant party death or “stasis zone” (read: slow party death) to spice things up. Progress is made in small part by fighting super-powerful enemies, but the vast majority of tasks involve finding extremely remote and cryptic clues (given that this was made by 80’s RPG designers, I imagine them sadistically chuckling to themselves every single minute at work), then somehow gleaning the solutions and using them…that is, if you can actually find the places you’re supposed to use them (no small feat given the gigatons of life-sucking torture, both the characters’ and yours, standing between you and these critical points). And of course, one tiny little misstep everywhere and at best you’ve lost hours of progress and at worst you’re completely doomed and you have to start the whole quest over from scratch. (I’d put “your whole party arrives at the Adventurer’s Guild in shiny urns” at roughly the 30th percentile.) And of course, if you get lost at any time…really easy given that every-frigging-thing looks exactly the same everywhere and you get zero visual or audio indication of anything…and don’t have someone who can teleport you to safety, your party’s fate is sealed. So how exactly does one avoid getting lost, you ask? Why, by getting a bunch of graph paper (so after paying for these games, we now have to pay for specialized equipment???) and drawing on then, one square at a time! If that sounds suspiciously like work to you, well, congratulations on actually having a job in the 80’s and not having hours and hours and hours to spend on tedium like this! Of course, that raises the issue of how you were supposed to do this unpaid drafting with darkness zones everywhere (seriously, there are entire levels that are completely in the dark) and disorienting teleporters and about 500,000 spinners, not to mention all those monsters inconveniently swarming you while you’re trying to get that wall or door down. But I don’t want to give the impression that it’s all about kicking you around like a dog and robbing you of every last shred of control…no, I mustn’t forget all the VAST POWERS YOU ATTAIN AFTER SPENDING THE EQUIVALENT OF AN OLYMPIC CYCLE BUILDING UP YOUR CHARACTERS only to see them nerfed to death when you need them the most. That teleport ability? Sorry, just the first two levels! High-damage spells? Come right at the time you start facing enemies that could take a nuclear missile with some mild discomfort. So to sum up, this trilogy is overwhelmingly sadistic, and dreary, and painful, and bewildering, and super punishing, and it freaking teases you on top of all that. I played BT1 when it first came out on PC, and I made it about halfway through the first sewer level before I realized that it was going to be nothing but Kenny McCormick Simulator from there on out. BT2, I think I made it about halfway through the first city; never even saw the “starter” dungeon (so named because it’ll make you want to use the game disk as a starter for your barbecue).
And then…I found the character editors on this site. 
Which allow you to alter EVERYTHING. Stats (up to 99…or higher!), hit points, spell points, experience points, gold, levels. And items! Want a Spectre Snare, Nospen Ring, or Mage Staff? It’s yours! Deck your warrior out in a full set of diamond armor? You got it! And if you lost or accidentally sold a crucial item, no worries, just put it right back! You can equip items on classes that normally could not equip them! You can even change you character’s name and class, and give a caster spell levels he shouldn’t even have yet. Want an Archmage or Geomancer from day one? Done! With this you never have to sweat anything again. No more grinding, no more scrounging, no more begging.
Of course, power is nothing without wisdom, which is where the online maps and guides come in. GameFAQs is a good resource, as always, but Steam has some truly detailed, comprehensive, and easy to understand maps which can guide you through the whole trilogy step by step. The really cool thing about the Steam authors is that they never asked the players if they wanted to know everything…they just assumed that if you were there the answer was “yes” and got straight to the point.
And that, to me, is the best part of this whole Bard’s Tale community, how amazingly chill it is. They played games that were outrageously difficult and torturous and draining to the bitter end, but unlike modern day hardcore degenerates, they didn’t consider their suffering a deranged badge of honor and turn insanely hostile toward anyone less singlemindedly obsessed than them. Their response was to realize that the games were horrible and make them better. If I’d come up to them crying about how hard the games were and how they were no fun at all and I hated them, their response probably would’ve been, “Yeah, we know. Here are some tools to help you out. No, it’s fine, we just want you to have a better time, enjoy!” Seriously, look at the site I linked earlier. No BS. No whining. No tedious arguments about “challenge” or “immersion” or “honor” or crap. All the help is right there, free for the downloading.
It’s so unbelievably gratifying, relieving, and…I’ll say it…joyous to know I’m not alone on this. And that’s why I am absolutely going to complete this trilogy. I owe it to these people, dangit! 
Ah Bard’s Tale. I played the first, and like you, never finished. It was too painful, and that was even with casting the compass spell and checking it’s orientation after EACH AND EVERY SQUARE OF MOVEMENT.
Gaaah. The horrors. Thankfully, I had graph paper on hand since I was already a TT-RPGer, but damn, after getting through a few levels I felt like death was a better end, and that was even after (in the version I played) I found ways to cheat.
Build a party, combine all their gold and gear onto one character (this included the helpful “pre-gens” my version came with standard). Then go to the files, and copy the character with all the loot 5 times, and build a new party with the 6, combine, repeat, and repeat and repeat.
So cash problems were solved. Then I ground a balanced party with a mage, and then copied the mage, which I evolved through the unspeakably tedious steps of leveling in the other sorcerous classes until it was an archmage. Then I duped IT, so I had a party of meat shields an additional dps for antimagic areas (another scream-worthy additional) and multiple archmages.
And I still got sick of the grind!
pant pant pant
Oh, the trauma is all coming back.
And this was in the early days of text based BBS, so I could get at least some help from other players, but I burned out so hard on that.
When I play Fallout 4 I dare not touch the “Grognak and the Ruby Ruins” mini-game, for it evokes so much pain of BT1 and Wizardry (another pain point) that I start clenching my teeth fit to grind them to dust!
Come on, man! I’m not saying your wrong about the grind and weirdness, but Jesus Christ, when that shit was new, we were just happy to have pictures… in 16 colors! It certainly doesn’t hold up to today’s game standards anymore than not having seatbelts don’t hold up to today’s car safety standards. But people back then were still delighted to pay money for such things! We spent many many hours loving those games because they were so much more advanced than what we had before.
We tried that game back in the day. And Might and Magic 1.
Great for the day, huge pains in the butt compared to today’s games.
Get this, my parents actually threw away Might and Magic 1 during the Satanic Panic because a D&D person at church told them how demonic it got and encouraged all parents to make sure their kids aren’t into RPG’s.
It was a phase. By the time I was into Final Fantasy and even Wizardy 8, they didn’t care anymore.
Note: Theya actually bought me and my brother replacement games for Might and Magic. They weren’t just throwing it away and leaving us with nothing. I mean, obviously it is ridiculous, but my parents weren’t total loons. Hey, we were fully vaccinated, etc.
I picked up a copy of the original Bard’s Tale back when I was 12 or so. Never got really far. Also picked up Wasteland at the same time.
One of these games was fun and I completed it. The other I gave up on before even finding the second dungeon level out of the 16 total dungeon levels.
One of these games I would later discover in emulation post college and went back to playing. Still had fun, though, the UI/UX certainly was noticeably out of date at that time. The other I also discovered through emulation, downloaded a bunch of annotated maps, and made my way through it and its two sequels. I then concluded that it’s a good thing I gave up when I did the first time because without having annotated maps I would never have had the patience to get through the game, even with ignoring all the spinners/teleporters/etc. that are designed to make mapping a living hell.
Later, I would encounter both these games again. One as part of crowdfunding Wasteland 2. And the other as part of crowdfunding Bard’s Tale 4.
One of them I played yet again. And still enjoyed it, especially now that I didn’t have to look up narrative text in a separate book/file, and some streamlining of the UI/UX. (Though, the combat felt really out-of-date at that point.) The other I didn’t even bother with because honestly it and its two original sequels just aren’t that good or fun.
My brother and I loved The Bard’s Tale. Even though it was entirely composed of literally the same 3 sprites over and over again, I could still probably navigate Skara Brae no problem today.
To this day I still remember leave the Guild, turn left, forward forward forward, turn right, there’s the Shoppe!
And when The Bard’s Tale Construction Set came out, we spent whole summer breaks on that thing.
Another person who loved The Bard’s Tale back in the day. Played it lots, although I was never that good at it.