Video Games Randomness - Prioritize specific game threads!

Paradroid · Post by **Paradroid** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 5:19 pm

Also, the "play next" row in your library shows not just games you haven't played, but also games you've barely touched.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:00 pm

The filters like play time and such do nothing to rearrange the list. they stay alphabetical. I also dont see 'Play Next' anywhere.

Paradroid · Post by **Paradroid** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 8:22 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:00 pm I also so see 'Play Next' anywhere.

When I click on my library and before selecting any game, I have a screen with my library list down the left side, and the rest (majority) of the screen taken up by various rows: what's new, recent games, and play next.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 9:42 pm

Paradroid wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 8:22 pm
Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:00 pm I also so see 'Play Next' anywhere.
When I click on my library and before selecting any game, I have a screen with my library list down the left side, and the rest (majority) of the screen taken up by various rows: what's new, recent games, and play next.

Ahhh you're talking about the desktop app not that webpage. I see.

Speaking of that 'order by' area. The only buttons that do anything in that area are the ones wit ha gear symbol on them. The playtime one does not have it. Neither do a couple others. But the rest work. Just my luck.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:13 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 9:42 pm
Paradroid wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 8:22 pm
Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:00 pm I also so see 'Play Next' anywhere.
When I click on my library and before selecting any game, I have a screen with my library list down the left side, and the rest (majority) of the screen taken up by various rows: what's new, recent games, and play next.
Ahhh you're talking about the desktop app not that webpage. I see.

Speaking of that 'order by' area. The only buttons that do anything in that area are the ones wit ha gear symbol on them. The playtime one does not have it. Neither do a couple others. But the rest work. Just my luck.

You likely have 'Game details' in your profile set to something other than public. The filters can't access your playtime.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:26 pm

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:13 pm
Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 9:42 pm
Paradroid wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 8:22 pm
Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:00 pm I also so see 'Play Next' anywhere.
When I click on my library and before selecting any game, I have a screen with my library list down the left side, and the rest (majority) of the screen taken up by various rows: what's new, recent games, and play next.
Ahhh you're talking about the desktop app not that webpage. I see.

Speaking of that 'order by' area. The only buttons that do anything in that area are the ones wit ha gear symbol on them. The playtime one does not have it. Neither do a couple others. But the rest work. Just my luck.
You likely have 'Game details' in your profile set to something other than public. The filters can't access your playtime.

Yes that was it. Thank you so much. I dont know why that one thing was off when I had all the rest on. But time played was set to hide. Now it is working.

Now if I could flip it so the least amount is at the top of the list

But it'll do.

EDIT: I notice a ton of games Ive played and actually finished list no time played at all. Either its not reading a bunch right or I played them somewhere else. But I know I did Mafia 3 just this year and played it all the way to the end and it is one of the null time games.

Also some stuff is listed at hundreds of hours and Ive never heard of them or played them. Like #4 says Ghost Recon Phantoms. Have no idea what that is. I dont own that. Its not even on STeam. yet its #4.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:28 pm

FWIW, I use that list constantly to find just the sort of game I'm in the mood for. I just wish I could add in the libraries from other services (Epic, Uplay, etc.)

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:32 pm

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:28 pm FWIW, I use that list constantly to find just the sort of game I'm in the mood for. I just wish I could add in the libraries from other services (Epic, Uplay, etc.)

Since GOG is incorporating other launchers maybe they will. Maybe you should suggest it to them.

Paingod · Post by **Paingod** » Mon Oct 26, 2020 9:50 am

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:32 pm
Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 11:28 pm FWIW, I use that list constantly to find just the sort of game I'm in the mood for. I just wish I could add in the libraries from other services (Epic, Uplay, etc.)
Since GOG is incorporating other launchers maybe they will. Maybe you should suggest it to them.

I don't think they're 'incorporating' other launchers as much as acknowledging them and pointing at them.

I like that I've linked all of my libraries in the GOG Galaxy launcher and can see all of my games there. I tried a solution Blackhawk suggested before but got tired of adding and categorizing my games and never really got to use it.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:01 am

Yeah, if you just want to put in your info and just have it list your games, GoG Galaxy is the way to go. Playnite is for those who want to customize the parameters themselves (say, to make custom searches.)

hitbyambulance · Post by **hitbyambulance** » Mon Oct 26, 2020 4:22 pm

https://www.lorenzostanco.com/lab/steam/ is the best third-party Seam-library filtering system i've found

jztemple2 · Post by **jztemple2** » Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:23 pm

And now for something completely different: 1980s USA goes to war against alternate reality USA in a new Zachtronics game

Indie studio Zachtronics, whose previous releases include three puzzle games—Infinifactory, Opus Magum, and Exapunks—and a graphic novel about AI therapy called Eliza, is doing something a little different for its next project. Mobius Front '83 is a turn-based strategy game set during the height of the Cold War that challenges players to defend America from attack by another America from an alternate universe.

Paradroid · Post by **Paradroid** » Mon Oct 26, 2020 8:42 pm

Hmm. I'm a big fan of Zachtronics so I won't write it off just yet, but that trailer showed absolutely nothing interesting at all.

jztemple2 · Post by **jztemple2** » Mon Oct 26, 2020 9:16 pm

Paradroid wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 8:42 pm Hmm. I'm a big fan of Zachtronics so I won't write it off just yet, but that trailer showed absolutely nothing interesting at all.

Those were pretty much my thoughts.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Tue Oct 27, 2020 11:35 pm

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:01 pm

Raven Software Co-Founder Talks About the Origins of Heretic, the 'Medieval Doom' – IGN Unfiltered

John Carmack: "Just do it like DOOM, and add the fantasy flavor."

dbt1949 · Post by **dbt1949** » Thu Oct 29, 2020 8:43 pm

I found out today that Steam has a folder called "hidden" and you can put your games in there and they won't show up in your library.
Why?
I guess if you have pron games you want hidden from your wife or something.
Just bought me a new game, Foundation, and somehow it ended up there.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:26 pm

You mean the hidden from your library function? I use that from time to time for redundant games (where the company releases an updated version as a separate product, like Titan Quest vs Titan Quest Anniversary), or for games where I end up with a permanent beta on my list, or for non-games (I have a bunch of SDKs on my list.) In other words, for stuff that will never be installed, even if I want to play the associated game.

Paradroid · Post by **Paradroid** » Fri Oct 30, 2020 4:10 am

I also use it for games I've ragequit and never want to think about again.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Fri Oct 30, 2020 10:20 am

I have a special category for those. I keep it collapsed, but I don't want to hide them entirely from my library.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Sat Oct 31, 2020 3:51 pm

The Google Doodle game

Holman · Post by **Holman** » Sat Oct 31, 2020 6:12 pm

I came across some old notes that led me to check the website for Shrapnel Games.

It turns out they still allow you to pre-order a copy of All American: The 82nd Airborne in Normandy.

I pre-ordered the game in June of 2000. That's not a typo.

dbt1949 · Post by **dbt1949** » Sat Oct 31, 2020 6:28 pm

They are so bad they border on being crooks.
I used to be part of the community but gave up on them.

Kasey Chang · Post by **Kasey Chang** » Sun Nov 01, 2020 11:53 pm

Playing "Radio Commander" and it certain scratches a different type of itch. You're a US Army company commander with platoons out in the field taking on VCs. You have to manage the units and coordinate other units to conduct pincer movement, call in artillery, and I assume later, other assets. It's not quite Majesty level nor do you handle any direct combat. Basically, all you do is order units to move, shoot, disengage, run double-time, you get the idea.

I'm only two missions in, and one of them was the tutorial!

Mission 1: Hearts and Minds -- order Alpha to visit the village, hand out pamphlets, and one of the elders let slip that there's a VC camp to the southeast. Ordered Alpha to go take a look, while Bravo wondered if they can have any fun. Told Bravo to secure the LZ, then both will pay a visit to the suspected site. Bravo secured the site, and Alpha went in cautiously and did find remnants of a camp. Burned it all down. As they were heading back to LZ, they were ambushed by VC units, but Bravo pinned them in place and Alpha engaged, and routed the unit. Unfortunately, I chose not to emphasize that there may be traitors in the village that warned off the VC (thus empty camp) and VC later took reprisal on the village and killed the elder that "let slip". In hindsight, should have voiced the concern and caught the traitor first.

Mission 2: Fight for hill 66 -- Charlie platoon was bushwhacked by various VC units and snipers and took many casualties and was in danger of being overrun as they were split into 3 zones around the LZ. Green One (Hueys) ferried in Bravo even as Alpha was deployed to firm up the perimeter. Alpha and Bravo moved into blocking positions, but Green One was only able to do medevac twice (two out of three locations) before darkness fell due to distance back to the base and to refuel. I made the decision NOT to make Green one do a night run and some of Charlie's wounded died in the night, which I had to live with. And all through the night, Alpha and Bravo saw movement, but turns out there was an artillery position (Foxtrot) nearby and they were doing a great job keeping up the barrage all night. And it was glorious as VC can't move fast enough in the dark, and was caught by both dug-in position and artillery. Survived multiple infiltration attempts, even got snipers snuck in behind us from a different hill. But none got close enough, some VC platoons simply surrendered or died in place. With daylight, I sent Green One to evac the third position of Charlie, then got orders to evac hill 66. Final tally... 1 WIA (not serious), 227 VC WIA, 75 KIA, most by artillery in the night.

Interface is kinda interesting, as your *does* have voice recognition, but it will let you do prompts by holding space and press numbers to issue commands as well as click on the map to give specific coordinate.s I decided not to use voice recognition, and was playing in "story mode" to get the full dialogue, which kinda works, and kinda doesn't. The voice acting was distinct, but when they got the artillery (Foxtrot battery) doing an extra-long Texas drawl in the middle of a fire mission "No can do, sir. Cannons gotta cool down." or something like that. ARGH.

I also got the "squad management" DLC which lets me choose which soldiers to promote which gains them some extra perks, like increase spotting distance, better stamina, faster XP gain, increased artillery range, faster reloading, and so on. Your units (and your individual soldiers) will level up, and the dialog reveals more background about them, which I assume will become important later as you need to motivate them to keep fighting in desperate situations. And it appears they do have a couple "regulars" plus dozens of other soldiers with decent amount of background written.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Tue Nov 03, 2020 8:11 pm

BlizzCon Online to be Free

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Wed Nov 04, 2020 3:23 pm

My Story of Apogee / 3D Realms

This is a HUGE HUGE post. Will take a long time to read through.

Joe Siegler

Those who know me (and have read my blog over the years) know that I spent quite some time working for Scott Miller & George Broussard of Apogee Software (later 3D Realms). Was probably the single most fun job I’ve ever had in my life, and to this day, I still wish the old team was together. I’m not getting into the why of that, just pointing out what happened in the past. I worked there from Dec of 1992 through May of 2009. I’ve talked about that part of my life in more detail elsewhere on this blog. That’s not why I’m writing today. I’m writing about the history of the company.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Wed Nov 04, 2020 5:01 pm

Ive been hit with my normal dose of cant make myself play something again. Usually I have all day then get into something before the day is out. But with the season and the time change I run out of daylight before thinking of anything. I get in a 5 min round of TF2 off and on. Maybe two or three times a day. Bout it.

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Wed Nov 04, 2020 5:37 pm

World of Tanks and Warships are running events for Halloween time.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Wed Nov 04, 2020 6:02 pm

Wasn't interested in them this year. Ive played them every year until this one.

Rumpy · Post by **Rumpy** » Wed Nov 04, 2020 10:27 pm

Thanks for posting that, Dae. I've always had a soft spot for them.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 12:19 am

Sure thing Rumpy. I have too. Used to love their shareware releases and of course Duke 3D. To me the way they were in the early to mid 90s along with id and some others is how I still see PC devs should be. Not 200 person teams and many multimillion budgets. I do miss those days and the wild rebel devs we had. And they made AAA games.

Rumpy · Post by **Rumpy** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 1:16 am

Yeah, they seemed like decent people to work for. Well, maybe until the whole Duke Nukem Forever development cycle. I can't even begin to imagine what it must have felt like to be working on a game for that long that constantly had changes and almost never got released, and then have it released as a middling game. How disheartening that must have been!

I bought the game for cheap long after it had released just for curiosity, and I did beat it, but oh man, what a loss of potential. It was so so bad, not only due to the limitations imposed, but because the style of humor just didn't work anymore with an industry that had moved forward. It's sad, but I doubt Gearbox will ever do another Duke Nukem because of how badly it was received. With Doom and Quake getting all these sequels, I still think a new Duke game could work, if done the right way.

JetFred · Post by **JetFred** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 5:25 am

Just over a year ago, I posted this:

JetFred wrote: ↑Fri Oct 04, 2019 11:12 pm
JetFred wrote: ↑Mon Jun 04, 2018 2:53 pm I’m finally doing something I’ve needed to do for a long time. Indie Gala was the last bundle site where I needed to break my mindless addiction. Humble and Fanatical aren’t a “problem” because they are less frequent than Indie Gala and include good games. But Indie Gala has been on a 3-a-week cycle for $3-$4 each for quite a while now, and nine times out of ten the bundle is 10-12 games that are ALL crap, not one single thing worth trying. And I’ve been buying them anyway because, we’ll, it’s crap I didn’t have. So in the last week or so I’ve skipped a few bundles from them, which is all I had to do to break the habit, make a new rule. Now I’ll only buy a bundle if there’s a game in it that I know I’d pay that price for if it were the only game.

Part of what made up my mind was a day when I’d gotten behind and had 100 keys to enter from IG and they were all garbage. That’s a lot of $3 flushed down the drain. Yay for breaking bad habits.

As proof that I slowed down on bundles, I was adding 1000 games (much of it garbage) about every 5-6 months. I think this time it took almost a year and a half. And I was at least halfway to the next 1000 before I slowed down.

My Indie Gala and Groupees habit was bad, and I wish I had that money back and the garbage out of my Steam library. When Steam recalculated game libraries, excluding content that had been booted off the platform, the fact that my profile reported hundreds fewer games and thousands fewer DLC was proof that I'd been adding absolute crap keys to my account for a long time. Anyway, as evidence that I've stuck to my new practice of buying bundles on average less frequently than once a month (not counting Humble Choice), it took me a year to get back to 9000. And During the first months of the pandemic lockdown, I actually finished enough shorter games that I felt somewhat justified for spending money on games at all.

I have to admit, though, that I've spent the cash recovered from the habit on my physical movie collection instead. Severe OCD is a bitch.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 9:00 am

JetFred wrote: ↑Thu Nov 05, 2020 5:25 am When Steam recalculated game libraries

They did what now? When?

Paradroid · Post by **Paradroid** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 12:02 pm

My reading of it is that at some point Steam updated everyone's "games owned" to account for games no longer available on Steam.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 5:07 pm

Something is happening on N7 Day.

jhaletweets wrote:SOOOOO EXCITED!!!

Saturday #N7Day (11/7) at 11am PST
#MassEffect cast and crew reunion panel LIVE!

here's the link to join us: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BjzXCLpgBXE ... e=youtu.be

if you can't make it, we'll have it up on our respective social media soon after

Speculation is rampant that there will be an official announcement about the Mass Effect trilogy remaster, aka Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

hitbyambulance · Post by **hitbyambulance** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 6:10 pm

there was some absolute garbage in some of those indie gala bundles - a few titles had a slapped-together appearance (and were terrible games) and would drop ridiculous numbers of achievements. they were all part of the Steam storefront purge:

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/ ... ment-Spam/

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 7:11 pm

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:23 pm And now for something completely different: 1980s USA goes to war against alternate reality USA in a new Zachtronics game

Wargamer review

You can probably tell I’m a little subdued about Möbius Front - that’s true, to an extent. But this is still a decent game; it's well made, has a great art style and the challenges it poses are - at their best - very engaging and will test your tactical prowess to the max. It’s just not a wargame, and it’s important to keep that in mind.

JetFred · Post by **JetFred** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 10:08 pm

Paradroid wrote: ↑Thu Nov 05, 2020 12:02 pm My reading of it is that at some point Steam updated everyone's "games owned" to account for games no longer available on Steam.

Correct.

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Thu Nov 05, 2020 6:10 pm there was some absolute garbage in some of those indie gala bundles - a few titles had a slapped-together appearance (and were terrible games) and would drop ridiculous numbers of achievements. they were all part of the Steam storefront purge:

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/ ... ment-Spam/

Correct.

dbt1949 · Post by **dbt1949** » Thu Nov 05, 2020 11:10 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Nov 05, 2020 7:11 pm
jztemple2 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:23 pm And now for something completely different: 1980s USA goes to war against alternate reality USA in a new Zachtronics game
Wargamer review

You can probably tell I’m a little subdued about Möbius Front - that’s true, to an extent. But this is still a decent game; it's well made, has a great art style and the challenges it poses are - at their best - very engaging and will test your tactical prowess to the max. It’s just not a wargame, and it’s important to keep that in mind.

They have a WW2version coming out too. I watched a game of the WW2 version and put it and the 83 version on my wish list. Still haven't made up my mind yet on them.