The Miscellaneous PC & vidya Games Thread

[Razgovory]

Maybe your kid just needs glasses.

[Josquius]

Read mad news today.
Forza Horizon 4, the UK one, has had all it's dlc taken off stores and will itself be delisted and no longer purchasable in a few months.

Apparently due to licensing issues.

Another boy of evidence against the shift to digital only.

[Tamas]

Atari 50: Anniversary Celebration

So I have a 10 year old who has discovered my Steam Deck and now regularly asks if he can play with the "game console"

I figured he would go for Hades or Animal Well or Jedi Fallen Order o something like that with decent graphics.

Nope.  His favorite is to load up the Atari 50 collection and play Centipede, Lunar Lander and Asteroids.

It's not just jet fueled nostalgia - those old games really had something.

 

[FunkMonk]

Turns out a remake of a masterpiece can also be a masterpiece.

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/24185656/riven-review-remake-remaster-pc-steam-vr

[Grey Fox]

Read mad news today.
Forza Horizon 4, the UK one, has had all it's dlc taken off stores and will itself be delisted and no longer purchasable in a few months.

Apparently due to licensing issues.

Another boy of evidence against the shift to digital only.

That's not new, it has happened to the previous 3 versions too. Car & music licence are expensive.

[Syt]

On the plus side, the online services remain. For now. I played FH4 a lot. FH5 didn't grab me near as much I found the Northern England/Southern Scotland setting  more interesting than Mexico, I guess.

[Syt]

Trailer for PVKK: Planetenkanonenverteidigungskommandant

Missile Command as immersive sim with some mystery plot?

[Solmyr]

That game looks very... German.

[Josquius]

Is this one of those games where you have to learn how to do an entire jobs worth of stuff to play it? 
Glancing at the comments.

Papers Please but the regime has funding

[Josquius]

So I've started playing Death Stranding.
I'm... Uncertain.
It seems very cool. Something about it grabs me.
The Kojima silliness - rebuild America! Forget Canada! Listen to Die Hardman! Is weird because it's together with something otherwise presenting as really serious with proper actors.
I also don't like the horror bits at all. Even gameplay wise creeping around BTs is a unfun pain.

Yeah I played through it a couple of years ago.

I think my biggest letdown was that most of the advanced kits etc you unlock to assist with the harsher terrains are ultimately not needed. You can just power through pretty much anything with very basic kit and tactics. And you are right about the horror bits, once you figure it out it's just an exercise in frustration.

Still, I did finish the story which in my case means I liked it as I have no problem abandoning games I don't like.

I finished it the other week.
Christ that ending dragged. I wonder how many people finished the actual gameplay but couldn't see themselves through that.
If this was pre Internet days where you couldn't check what's going on id wager many.

It's good. But weird. I'm not sure on the walking sim label as that goes away before too long.
And the difficulty curve is really broken. Really tense and hard at the start but this goes away.
Probably heightened in my case as when I started playing I didn't realise but I was having connection issues and didn't see other people's stuff until after a few missions in the central zone. With all that basically no need to ever build more than a little bit of road yourself.

I never used most advanced stuff either. Just a truck and you're sorted generally.

I'm interested to see what they do with the second. Probably amplify weird bits rather than the good bits.

And the really sincere performances from quality actors delivering such nonsense 

[Syt]

This seems a bit ambitious for an indie project:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3064810/Strategos/

Simulate large scale warfare with the armies of antiquity in Strategos. With thousands of men on screen, you can recreate real or speculative historical battles between the major and minor powers of the ancient Mediterranean.



Strategos is an ancients wargame with large scale formation movements and disorder, unordered charges, pursuing, evading, routing and morale shocks, fog of war, terrain effects, flanking and command and control simulations that bring a hardcore tabletop feel to digital, real-time wargaming.





The armies of Strategos span nearly a thousand years of the classical period, from the Hoplites and Immortals of the Persian Wars, to the rise of the Sasanian Empire against Imperial Rome.



The game contains over 200 unique units and over 50 unique factions, including the various Hellenic Empires, The Achaemenid Persian Empire, Rome and Carthage across different eras, Gallic, Germanic and Iberian tribes, Umbrians, Samnites and other native Italians, the major city states of ancient Greece, the Thracians, and more.



Factions:
*not limited to below

Aksumite/Abyssinian
Early (Persian Wars) and Later (Alexander) Achaemenid Empire
Aitolian
Antigonid
Apulian
Armenian (Tigranes and non-Tigranes)
Athenian
Bithynian
Blemmye/Nobades
Bosporan
Campanian
Carthaginian (Early/Late)
Commagene
Etrusccan
Galatian
Gallic
Germanic
Graeco-Bactrian
Early Hoplite Greek (Later Hoplite Greek armies are distinguished by city state)
Hellenistic Greek
Illyrian
Italian Tribes
Judaean
Kappadokian
Kushan
Latin
Lysimachid
Macedonian (Pre-Alexander, Alexander, Imperial, Early Successor. and Late Successor)
Meroitic Kushite
Nabataean
Numidian
Palmyran
Parthian
Pergamenid
Phokian
Pontic
Ptolemaic (Early/Mid/Late)
Pyrrhic (Early/Late)
Roman (Tullian, Camillan, Polybian, Marian, Early Imperial, and Mid-Imperial)
Saka
Samnite
Sarmatian
Sassanid
Seleucid (Early/Mid/Late)
Skythian
Spanish (Iberian, Celtiberian, Lusitanian, and Sertorius)
Spartan
Syracusan
Tarantine
Theban
Thessalian
Thracian (Early, Gallic, Hellenized, and Roman Client)
Umbrian

Custom battle options include selection of army lists, allies, units, army sizes, era, map, deployment distance and sides, difficulty, AI type/aggression, whether to use AI at all (alternative is hotseat), and optional randomization of army lists with options to filter random armies by era, importance, and whether they are steppe armies. Current historical battles include Issos and Raphia, with more to come.

[Syt]

Incidentally, NorbSoft's Scourge of War is back on Steam as an Early Access/Remaster title after they left Slitherine:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2205330/Scourge_Of_War__Remastered/

Welcome to Scourge of War. We hope you are ready for a fight. This game places you in command of the units of armies and allows you to refight the many historical bloody clashes during the age of regimental base warfare. This is a type of wargame that we call real time command simulation. Real time command simulation combat begins with Sid—as in Sid Meier, who released the now legendary wargame Sid Meier's Gettysburg (SMG) in 1997. This game established a new genre, freeing players from the confines of the earlier wargame conventions of the hex grid and dice roll. It placed the units on a 3D battlefield and lets the player/commander move units around. There were no turns—combat happened in real time and could be interrupted only by putting the entire game on pause. It also included a multi-player (MP) feature that is still in use today. Then came Sid Meier's Antietam in 1998, an evolutionary release that introduced players to the deceptively rolling terrain outside of Sharpsburg and included other battles in the Antietam Campaign at South Mountain and Crampton's Gap. The next step in the evolution of the genre was Breakaway Games' transfer of the game engine to the Napoleonic Wars with the release of Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Battle, in 2001. The final chapter for the Sid Meier engine was Austerlitz: Napoleon's Greatest Victory, released in 2002. A new chapter in black powder era combat simulation opened in 2005 with the release of Civil War: Bull Run by Mad Minute Games. This game is built on the traditions of the Sid Meier games but was an entirely new generation. It was noted for its highly capable Artificial Intelligence (AI) opponent and careful attention to historical detail. The second and final game from this very small company was Take Command: 2nd Manassas, appearing in 2006. This release also included the battles of Cedar Mountain and Chantilly, the bookends of the campaign. Both games received multiple awards reflecting the historical accuracy and intensity of the real time command experience.

Then came the start of the Scourge of War series. Recreating Gettysburg and Waterloo in the same fashion. It's been many years since those initial releases and old men need something to do in their twilight years. So, we figured we'd take our time and fix some issues, rebrand the game, get on Steam, upgrade the art, and see what we can do to improve performance. There are improvements to the graphics engine and a large number of next generation art assets. The AI has improvements that build on the experience from previous games. The AI is smarter, meaner, and more likely to run you off the battlefield unless you are a skilled wargamer. This game now uses the Steam multi-Player features to allow you to match your skills against human opponents anywhere in the world the AI or both at once. So, make sure your guns are clean, your powder is dry, and get ready for battle on the legendary battlegrounds of history!

[Jacob]

Strategos looks right up my alley.

[The Minsky Moment]

Doesn't Field of Glory already occupy that niche?

[Jacob]

Doesn't Field of Glory already occupy that niche?

Possibly. It's okay to have more than one contender, from my perspective.