Saturday!
Holy cow, Game Dev Tycoon is addictive. It’s a simple and elegant “tycoon” game in the same vein as Roller Coaster Tycoon (or Prison Architect) and doesn’t have that many surprises if you’re familiar with the genre. You start out in your garage putting together simple games and trying to figure out what the best combinations are… “Space + Simulation” works well, for example, “Casual + PC” doesn’t. When you have your first major breakthrough, you move out of the garage and are able to work on larger and larger games, develop your own game engines, research more game styles, and hope to eventually come out with the next Mass Effect 3.
Now, this game also has a cute story. The publisher released a “CRACKED AND WORKING” version of the game on various pirate sites that is deliberately hobbled. About halfway through, you start finding that pirates are stealing more and more of your games and so your company starts floundering. This has resulted in some absolutely delightful quotations found on various messageboards from players of the “CRACKED AND WORKING” version complaining about the pirates ruining their game development. Ah, internet. Never change.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a “Tycoon” game that isn’t depressing as heck like Prison Architect, you should pick up Game Dev Tycoon. Seriously, you will love your first all 9s and 10s review.
So… what are you playing?
“Just one more game, just one more game” has a bit of a different meaning but it amounts to the same phenomenon.Report
I’m a bit late to the party but I’ve been playing a lot of Hotline Miami. It’s basically a tactical murder simulator like Hitman with the arcadey mechanics turned up to 11 but stripped of the killer fetish that Hitman lays on thick. Your character is actually not a good person, and the three masked creatures that periodically show up in his apartment tell him so. The closest I can compare it to is Breaking Bad, which always retained a highly-polished style even when it was showing great tragedy. I had read a lot of hype going into it and was a little weary, with my initial reaction to it as a fun tactical game with a few hyper-violent elements that sell a fairly cliche moral at how desensitized we’ve become to our actions when there are points involved. But as I’ve gotten over the learning curve and the plot has progressed, there is actually quite a bit of depth, and the extent to which death has become entirely a matter of muscle memory still catches me off guard sometime. It’s sort of like a version of “Papers, Please!” about hired killing, if that makes any sense.
The feeling reminders me of a time when I was still a teenager and dad was very adamantly against video games in the home specifically because of his fear of desensitization. At some point (in the early days of computers) he temporarily broke this embargo and brought home one of those military flight simulators that was hyper-realistic and had a manual the size of a Russian novel. It was supposed to be a compromise educational video game. Of course, as soon as we started playing it I gleefully kamikaze’d my jet into a military hospital – to my dad’s utter shock and disappointment – and he literally unplugged the computer. The embargo was back on until I left for college. I wonder if he would have appreciated Hotline Miami for the message it’s trying to send or just been completely disgusted by it.
Anyway, the top-down tactical style has gotten me pretty interested in that game-type, and I’m very excited about this Steam development game Door Kickers that’s like a smarter Hotline Miami without any of the moral difficulties. Are there any recent (or even abandon-ware) games that do this top-down house-storming tactics thing well? I’ve heard good things about Frozen Synapse and Monaco but they seem more like LAN party games than single-player.Report
Does Hotline Miami offer a windowed mode yet? I tried playing a while back, and the low res graphics stretched out over my 30″ monitor was actually painful to look at.Report
No windowed mode that I could find, but I’m playing it at 1920×1080 full-screen so I think getting used to the low res (which was definitely weird at first) is just part of the experience.Report
I got Hotline Miami with an Indie Bundle a while back, but I have not tried it yet. It is on the last of games I need to get too.Report
That game is Crack.
I just finished my first successful campaign and somehow became a major producer of shooters. My top game was Brains++ which was fourth in a series of Zombie Action games. It was also an unbelievable cash cow for me. I’d try my hand at RPG’s, AAA games, an MMO and then I’d go back to another BRAINS!!! sequel, make a few million and feel better.Report
You know what I miss? Theme Hospital. I think I’ve still got my original install disk…I wonder how many backflips I’d have to do to get it to run on 7? Or GoG has it for six bucks.
I’m currently fumbling my way through XCOM on Classic difficulty. I suck hard at Classic, but I discovered today that extreme patience, heavy use of cover and hunker down, and taking that 25% shot when it’s all you got will make the AI do silly things, too.Report
Not much gaming this weekend. I played a little bit of Borderlands 2, maybe an hour or two. I also got Diablo 3 for the PS3, so my son and I can kill demons together, and I played it for about an hour last night.Report