Octopus Overlords

One of the surest ways to get me to play an olde game is to buy a new one.

Steam and I disagree on the application of the word ignore.

Funny

For grins, I apparently bought Diablo / Hellfire combo on GOG from way back when. Decided to fire it up, and oh boy, it sure brings back memories... but also the frustrations. Bajillion mouse-clicks, limited inventory, ancient resolution (even if helped by hi-res support, AA, anisotropic filtering, etc.) and severe lack of "quality of life" improvements for this genre, like auto loot, autosort inventory, and so on. I should be playing Van Helsing. *sigh*

Decided to start up Homeworld: Deserts of Kharark. It's a pretty good looking engine. The zoom level was definitely impressive. I am a "play on easy" guy, and I hit one of the bugs in mission 4, where if I did TOO well, the game kinda got stuck. Fortunately, all I need to do is to save the game, and reload it, and the endgame condition will be triggered properly. It's certainly interesting twist on the Homeworld formula with persistent "fleet" and more.

I wanted to buy more games, but I decided I've already spent enough and will save my wishlist for next Steam Sale. *sigh*

*I also posted this in the Looking for Group thread but figured more people would see it here.

Rockstar is giving away gold in RDR2 and $1,250,000 in GTAV among other things.

All you have to do is link your R* Social Club acount with Twitch and boom, free money.

Players who link their Twitch Prime accounts to their Social Club accounts and claim their benefits by July 19th will receive:

• GTA$1,250,000 in GTA Online

• RDO$300 in Red Dead Online

• The Superior Ammo Bundle in Red Dead Online, which includes 30

Dynamite Arrows, 60 Incendiary Buckshot Ammo, 30 Volatile Fire Bottles

and 200 Express Ammo for the Pistol, Revolver, Repeater & Rifle

Rockstar Games Social Club x Twitch Prime Benefits will include exclusive weekly discounts on premium items, and an additional 10% or higher bonus discount on all weekly discounted items in GTA Online and Red Dead Online, along with bonus value on purchases of Shark Cash Cards in GTA Online or Gold Bars in Red Dead Online.

This year's Steam Summer Sale seems a non-event for me. I just ... don't care. I've been so burned out on everything that I'm not excited about anything there. I picked up three titles from my wish list that had solid discounts, but don't know if I'll get to them any time soon.

GTA V, Stapoint Gemini Warlords, and Sea Dogs - for just under $40.

Paingod wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 8:10 am This year's Steam Summer Sale seems a non-event for me. I just ... don't care. I've been so burned out on everything that I'm not excited about anything there. I picked up three titles from my wish list that had solid discounts, but don't know if I'll get to them any time soon.

GTA V, Stapoint Gemini Warlords, and Sea Dogs - for just under $40.

I finally picked up the Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition while it's available for <$20 (which is basically the base game + Horizons season pass, along with some paint jobs).

As someone that grew up playing the original wireframe-graphics Elite many moons ago on the BBC Micro, I'm throughly enjoying the updated version. While it still has a significant learning curve, thankfully it's nowhere near as harsh as it used to be back in the day.

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:57 amI finally picked up the Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition while it's available for <$20 (which is basically the base game + Horizons season pass, along with some paint jobs).

Over and over I look at Elite and think about getting it and talk myself out of it each time. It's been on my wishlist for ages. I check it out again at each sale and have once even had it in my Cart, but failed to pull the trigger.

I bought that MONTHS ago, but hadn't had a chance to get into it, as other games keep taking my attention.

Decided I played too much Battletech, I bought some cheaper games for grins.

Robothorium is basically a procedural dungeon fight JRPG style, albeit with robots. You get a couple different classes of robots, and they are well-disguised but still RPG archetypes: warrior (equal attack/defend), tank (more defend than attack), barbarian (extra attack), healer, monk, and bard. The actions are your typical attack, heal, buff, debuff, with different scopes (single target, line of enemy Front or Back, all enemies). Each class has 5 levels of active and passive "skills", and each level has 5 different "skills". You get one "point" of talent to put into each of these skills. You need to open up at least 2 skills on each level to unlock the next "level". However, you can only take 4 (later, 5) skills into battle.

There is a somewhat new mechanic called "overload". Special attacks generate "overload", normal attack decrease overload. If you hit 100% overload, you are "stunned" for one turn. Same for the enemy. The SINGER (bard) class can turn enemy overload levels into damage, and can be devastating if all the enemies have build up some serious overload.

Each "dungeon" seems to be procedurally generated. And between missions, you can send idle members onto special missions to gain additional loot.

Speaking of loot, each class has unique 6 slots for equipment, and while SOME equipment can be used by multiple classes, some are class specific. (Why isn't there a filter to show only stuff usable by a particular class?) Much like Diablo and other random dungeon crawlers, the equipment can have different buffs. Some may buff shield, some can buff hull, some can buff resistance... It is up to you to choose which one is better. There's even different rarity, from common to rare to mythic.

So a fight is basically each side shoot at the other, while attempting to buff one's own side and debuff the other side.

So far, it's not bad, as I'm doing the random missions to raise levels, but pretty soon I have to do a campaign mission to advance the plot. 6/8 tentacles.

Paingod wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 11:18 am

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 10:57 amI finally picked up the Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition while it's available for <$20 (which is basically the base game + Horizons season pass, along with some paint jobs).

Over and over I look at Elite and think about getting it and talk myself out of it each time. It's been on my wishlist for ages. I check it out again at each sale and have once even had it in my Cart, but failed to pull the trigger.

Well, it's currently available for close to the lowest price they've had for it. If you've ever enjoyed playing Freelancer and the like, it definitely makes for a highly evocative space sim, and looks terrific with the EDFX graphics mod and ReShade Shader Framework. The staggering amount of detail and freedom it provides is arguably its greatest aspect. You can reach every star you see in the night sky and do pretty much whatever you wish to earn a living, as illustrated in the chart below:

I should probably buy something. I never did shake my gaming slump; it's coming up on a month since I've played anything, and I feel no urges at all. Maybe a new game will snap me out of it. Sale goes through this week, right?

I got a physical copy of the game in box from the crowd funded thing. Ive played 5 min. How longs it been out now?..2 or 3 years?

Looked it up...2014. Yikes.

Kraken wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 6:44 pm I should probably buy something. I never did shake my gaming slump; it's coming up on a month since I've played anything, and I feel no urges at all. Maybe a new game will snap me out of it. Sale goes through this week, right?

Sale ends on the 9th.

I bought a pack of all the Leisure Suit Larry games...from Fanatical...for $1.99. I'm not doing a great job of following the rules for a STEAM sale. Add me to the group of people that is both overwhelmed with backlog (again) and uninspired by this latest promotion. Makes me sad because even after all the sale changes, I still looked forward to it. I hope this isn't a preview of what's coming in December.

It ought to tell you something that I think I'm done at $30. Between this and my current disappointment with Humble Bundle, I may have to resort to playing games instead of buying them.

I only spent about $10 on five games but splurged on OOTP 20 for $20. 1/2 off.

Bought and spent nothing.

infinitelurker wrote: ↑Sat Jun 22, 2019 10:30 am I just completed my every-few-years replay of Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004)

I've been playing that game since the late 80's on my Apple IIe, and I still get the itch to fire it up every 2 to 3 years, thinking I'll just play for a few minutes. Then, before you know it, I'm looking at this:



and after dividing the plunder:



Call me crazy, I even enjoy the dancing minigame.

You married your own daughter? Dastardly Dan indeed!

I played a lot of this game for the few years after it was released, but it's been a while. The box is still up on the shelf above my PC, in case I get the itch again.

There aren't any games that I really wanted to buy either, so I just picked up the blood dlc for Total War: Three Kingdoms and the humanoid species dlc for Stellaris. After applying my $6.00 discount from the grand prix event, they cost me a whopping $2.48.

I should have enough tokens for another $6.00 discount by the end of the sale, so I might pick up something else on the cheap by the time it's over.

i'm still trying to get one of several of my friends to play a game online with me... any game. it's like pulling teeth at this age.

Anonymous Bosch wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 6:24 pm

I saw my path in there under the "Isolated" heading. I typically don't enjoy playing with others, so the career path seems pretty clear. That might be what keeps me from pulling the trigger.

I ran the first couple missions in GTA V last night - and I really need to tighten the sloppy controls of ... everything. I forgot how much it feels like a console port, even as an 80GB download. I found the instructions to help with my mouse - moving from Raw Input to Direct Input and disabling VSync. Now I just need to tune the sensitivity of that and the car handling.

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:54 am i'm still trying to get one of several of my friends to play a game online with me... any game. it's like pulling teeth at this age.

That's why I am raising my own gaming partners.

It would take an act of god to get me to play multiplayer too.

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:54 am i'm still trying to get one of several of my friends to play a game online with me... any game. it's like pulling teeth at this age.

Brian was in the same boat a couple of years ago. He posted a thread. The result was four of us playing twice a week for two years ever since. We've gone through a dozen games and hundreds of hours of fun. I'd say we've all become pretty good friends, too.

The moral of the story: OO is an amazing community and resource, and there are likely others in the same boat. Find them.

I never do "random mystery key bundles" from anyone, but I just picked up Kingdom Come Deliverance from Fanatical (they have better prices than STEAM sale) and figured for $1.89, why not add two mystery keys. One of them was for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and having apparently hit the random lottery (a Call of Duty game for $0.99???) I will now never do that again.

Kingdom Come is on my short list. This has been an expensive summer, though (unexpected bird supplies), so I'll shoot for the next sale.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:33 pm Kingdom Come is on my short list. This has been an expensive summer, though (unexpected bird supplies), so I'll shoot for the next sale.

Ive wanted it too but $17 is just shy of my break point.

Aside from my recent Pirates! run, I have been in a bit of gaming rut. I splurged a bit on the Steam sale to try to pass the time until Rebel Galaxy Outlaw comes out, which I have very high hopes for and am anxiously watching for any news of a release date.

Even though I bought a number of games, I've really only been playing Super Mega Baseball 2 and having a lot of fun with it. I'm not a huge sports guy, but I always seem to like sports-'light' games, and Super Mega Baseball 2 reminds me a lot of Hardball from back in the Apple II days.

I also liked Hardball even though I don't care for sports anything very much.

I just found my 20-year-old old Microsoft Sidewinder steering wheel and pedals. Any idea if I'll be able to get it to work with anything modern? It's USB.

Oh, I also need someone to tell me it's okay how many hours I've spent on the Fantasy Mosaics games.

Just hit a wall in Robothorium. Apparently, taking on TWO Cybergladiators at a time is beyond my existing team's abilities. I was just getting SLAUGHTERED when they are stacking their debuffs on me while reversing my debuffs. I obviously came with the wrong team and skills. *sigh*

Tried to play Joe Dever's Lone Wolf. I thought it's a traditional RPG. it is, but the interface is clunky, as it's adhering a bit too much to tabletop conventions, and when the gameplay hits, it's basically QTE (quick time events), i.e. button mashing, except it's slashing and drawing arcs with the mouse.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:39 pm

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:33 pm Kingdom Come is on my short list. This has been an expensive summer, though (unexpected bird supplies), so I'll shoot for the next sale.

Ive wanted it too but $17 is just shy of my break point.

It's on my list as well.

Are the winners of the Steam race week free games only posted after the sale is over? Any chances of me winning one of my top 3 before the sale is over, or do I only find out after the sale is done? If they give the prizes after the sale is finished, then I may need to buy them now since I'm probably not going to win one.

My top 4: No Man's Sky, Fell Seal - Arbiter's Mark, Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 3:54 am Tried to play Joe Dever's Lone Wolf. I thought it's a traditional RPG. it is, but the interface is clunky, as it's adhering a bit too much to tabletop conventions, and when the gameplay hits, it's basically QTE (quick time events), i.e. button mashing, except it's slashing and drawing arcs with the mouse.

Trust me, you're much better off playing Lone Wolf Saga. It's essentially a free Android app that allows you to play all of the original game books of the Lone Wolf saga exactly as intended courtesy of the ProjectAon.org web site, and it's vastly more enjoyable than any button-mashing QuickTime-Events.

Hrdina wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:24 am You married your own daughter? Dastardly Dan indeed!

I played a lot of this game for the few years after it was released, but it's been a while. The box is still up on the shelf above my PC, in case I get the itch again.

I didn't even notice that!

I say install it give it another spin. It runs well on the latest hardware and even high resolutions.

I bought Mad Max on Steam before realizing it still has Denuvo.

JetFred wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 6:05 pm Oh, I also need someone to tell me it's okay how many hours I've spent on the Fantasy Mosaics games.

I bought a couple of DLCs for Battle Academy 1. The original game is 9 years olde.

Max Peck wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:38 amI should have enough tokens for another $6.00 discount by the end of the sale, so I might pick up something else on the cheap by the time it's over.

Or, alternatively, I could use the second $6.00 discount to give myself 15% off on Wolfenstein: Youngblood.

Would I like the Witcher 3 GOTY edition? At $14.99 it's tempting me. I do like a good adventure game, and have read much praise for Witcher 3. I do not, however, like frantic realtime combat. The slo-mo VATS combat in Fallout 4 is about as intense as I can handle. I can deal with realtime if it's pausable. I really don't know much about Witcher except that people love it.

I have it and it's too hand eye coordination for me.