Sly's St(r)eam Tombola Thread: Metal Hellsinger

[radiofloyd]

Voted for Sunless Skies. Looks like ETS2 is gonna win but if Sunless Skies somehow won I would recommend playing Sunless Sea first if you haven’t (and own it).

[Sly Reflex]

Well Eurotruck won. I thought I'd be a Balkan causing chaos, but it looks like I'm going to be causing chaos in the Balkans. Maybe. I don't know.

 

I'm taking requests for places I can go to. Not all the cities or Europe are there, but you're welcome to drop me a place you want me to go. 

[Sly Reflex]

I forgot to put up the votes last time, but we had a dud. After Eurotruck 2 Song of Horror was drawn and won the vote, but it was a big load of rotten balls. A new draw was taken and Prison architect won by a country mile.

 

Next vote I'll try to remember to post here about what they are. But now, to the Prison Architect thread!

[Sly Reflex]

Drew the next 6 games for voting.

 

• The Messenger
• Abe's Odyssey
• Simulcra
• Morkredd
• Level Head
• They Bleed Pixels

So more likely than not, I will end up playing a 2D platformer next, with varying degrees of difficulty.

[mfnick]

The Mesenger is great.

[one-armed dwarf]

I would vote The Messenger but what about some fart asmr as well.

[Sly Reflex]

I just realised I'd not updated this. Morkredd won and was actually a surprising game. Just a one sitting thing, roll the ball to the end. Not much more to say about it.

 

Graveyard Keeper won the vote after. It's OK, very sedate manual task game. Do the thing, someone needs help, you do the job, it passes on to someone else, but they need things from other people you have to sort out sort of thing. It's a bit like Stardew, but not really.

 

I have no idea when the next games will be drawn as the current game is really fucking long.

[Sly Reflex]

Internal sever error trying to edit the thread title. But yeah, the next 6 games have been drawn at random and they are...

 

• World of Goo
• Bee Simulator
• Fallout New Vegas
• Strange Brigade
• Fallout 3
• Bioshock

I could potentially be playing one of these games up until Christmas with the length of them.

[DANGERMAN]

@Sly Reflex I tried editing it for you, not sure to what, but yeah, I got the error too. I can only think it's the amount of code in the OP, but I don't want to mess with that and lose stuff you've done

[Sly Reflex]

Yeah, there's a lot of shite in there. Just leave it, innit. The forum seems to be throwing a wobbler at every turn when trying certain things and I don't want to end up making it worse than it already is by tinkering.

[Sly Reflex]

That's Graveyard Keeper done. Terrible game, I can't recommend it at all. I don't do it often, but I wrote a steam review to warn people off it.

 

Next up, Bioshock. Let's see if over a decade has altered my perception on it like it did with Dead Space.

[Sly Reflex]

Bioshock is done. Liked it more this time around, mostly because it was easier to play with the mouse and keys, the shooting wasn't great on 360 so the extra dexterity afforded by mouse aiming made the combat more tolerable. Still not amazing, but passable.

 

Story goes fucking hard until it busts a nut at that twist, then it spends the rest of the game pushing rope.

 

I think I stand pretty much where I did before, it's still mad overrated, but credit where credit's due, that world building and story telling up to the bit is where gaming excels.

 

Next up, Bad North. Yes, I know none of you will have heard of it. It's very short so no doubt I'll dump what I think in here, unless there's already a thread for it.

[Sly Reflex]

Nuked the original post to remove all the formatting shite and it worked. Next up is Don't Starve. I know for sure I won't finish this, but lets see how we get on.

 

Between Don't Starve and Bioshock I played a game called Bad North. I thought it was shite and have very little more to say about it other than avoid.

[Maryokutai]

I actually liekd Bad North, I think it's a nice little "in between" game and a perfect fit for Switch handheld mode. Nothing to get into hardcore, but I paid very little for it during a sale and enjoyed it for three or four hours.

[Sly Reflex]

My issues with Bad North is that it's a terribly opaque in the way it handles things, despite it following a template that is usually well defined with the info it relays.

 

Predicting what's going to happen in a strat game is pretty important. Bad North is pretty arse at this, you just have to play over and over to learn what everything does, there's no "Here, if you go to this island you get a new unit" or anything like that. It tells you literally nothing and is full of nasty surprises that I just wasn't prepared to swallow. I get that everything is legends and icons to cut down on translation costs, but a tutorial wouldn't go amiss outside of telling you how to move units and alter the camera.

 

Look at something like FTL. You can have the worst luck in that game, but repeated attempts teach you to cobble something together that could possibly work.

 

In Bad North you don't get this, you get these weird hybrid enemies that defy the paper, scissors, stone method of strengths and weaknesses and you have to soak up acceptable losses or even completely lose units. I tried many configurations and it just felt like unfair shite.

 

Being able to replay the same island over and over picking the most efficient way to deal with the incoming attacks blow by blow showed me that you can effectively get into position where you can't win, the odds aren't just stacked against you, there are no odds, it's just a confirmed loss. It allows you to enter into battles where a wipe is on the cards.

 

I look at the games I've played from a strat point of view and I can't really point out any where even at full strength it's futile to try progressing. It's made harder that when some skirmishes start it's really hard to keep track of even in slow mode, making it unclear on friendly and enemy units strength because they're overlapping and being thrown about.

 

So imagine the whole go so many islands before having to start over again aspect of it only to fall to the same units not matter what combo you put in front of them, or have to deal with some sucker punch that you have no way of knowing what it is until it wipes you out.

 

No thanks. All it made me want to do is play Into The Breach, a game that doesn't resort to playing cunts tricks and actually explains what's going on in a clear and precise manner.

[Maryokutai]

Fair enough, that's a reasonable explanation. There's a good chance I never played it for long enough to encounter these issues or just simply not noticed them as much as I treated it more like a casual thing.

[Sly Reflex]

Another thing is is I found it impossible to differentiate between units that were upgraded and those that were not on the deployment screen. I assumed it had something to do with the length of the banner, but hey, like I said the game can't tell you anything specific, you had to deploy them or remember the names top be sure.

 

Could have been a great game, maybe it even is if anything is explained. 

[Sly Reflex]

Really surprised with Dirt 3. Outside of the annoying as fuck radical talk the game is super solid. Compared to Dirt Rally 2 that I played a bit ago it's super arcadey as well, sometimes you don't even need to brake, throttle control and a knack for precise drifting is all you need.

[DANGERMAN]

Yeah, Dirt 3 is great, really enjoyed it back in the day

[mfnick]

I loved Dirt 3. One of my favourite racing games, the handling model is great and at the time the graphics were pretty special.

If you turn all the HUD off and use the cockpit view during rallies it’s incredibly immersive too and just does a good job of making you feel like a driving God. Love it.