Weregamer's Game Musings

Can't delete a spam comment, the UI for it is gone but the hell still says to look in the old place. Mobile UI is a mess, desktop UI doesn't work on Android. G+ seems to be on its way to shutting down. I loathe Facebook as a company and distrust giving them and chance to run code on my property. Google can't be trusted to leave a working product alone and working. Sigh.

The highest quality (both game quality and code quality), best supported game I've ever played, is 100% free to download and play - they survive on cosmetic and convenience microtransactions (as in, extra stash tabs for those of us who hoard in ARPGs, extra character slots for us altoholics). I don't think their financials are public, but I'm sure I'm not the only player who feels guilty for the number of hours I've enjoyed this game compared to the mere dozens of bucks I've spent. The game started out as a far better replacement for Diablo II than the Blizzard one, and they just keep adding freshness and tuning things - and i don't recall a single heavy nerf because they beta test well and are not enslaved by a PvP focus. If you haven't tried Path of Exile yet, do yourself a favor.

This sounds really amazing - something like Eternal Darkness only not horrific, in that the game reaches out from the screen to interact with the player out of character. In ED that deepened the horror and provided comic relief simultaneously; this sounds like it might feel differently to different people but still very cool I don't need to repeat the RPS article, I'll just link to it. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/12/oneshot-review/

Paradox just shipped a free update to Stellaris featuring a story written by Alexis Kennedy. That's enough to get me to think about trying it again. I checked out the patch notes, and I see a lot of clean up of things that bugged me about the game. But wait a minute. These are the notes for the fourth major patch, and they clean up things that were wrong (sometimes obviously) from the start? I'll chalk it up to development priorities; certainly there was a lot missing that needed to be added, and since the main point of the game is to look like a 4X while actually being a 1X bolted on to a standard Paradox set-piece political game I guess problems with the other three Xes were not as high a priority. I'm certain I'll try Stellaris again at some point, especially if they get more good writers in on making snippets for it. But I doubt it will ever really be my kind of game.

From a user named Heklios on the civfanatics forum, some words very worth repeating: I would kindly like to remind everyone that, among the total amount of people who bought Civ 6 : - few go about reading Civ6 related stuff online. - even fewer spend the time to write threads on forums. - and those who do write threads are mostly men in the middle to upper age category (I said mostly). I cant recall ever thinking about reading articles on Civ2 when I was 13 years old. It was my very own personal adventure where the difficulty level would matter much less than extrapolating in my mind a rifleman entering a pixelated forest into a real fantasy going on in my imagination. So the opinions you can read here are absolutely not representative of the general opinion. Please, go on and play on Settler if you wish, my son loves it. And I watch him pinch his lips to voice out the sound of the bombard each time it fires, living his own adventure, and me, envying him.

I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring

The Wii U was (IMO) a dumb idea that (factually) tanked, evidence that Nintendo had no clue how to follow up what made the Wii a breakthrough product. But it looks like they may have figured out what they are doing right with the 3DS, and how to really cash in on the new trend toward multiscreen entertainment at home without being needlessly expensive, asymmetrically lame on multiplayer, and totally separate from their successful handhelds. http://kotaku.com/heres-your-first-look-at-the-nx-nintendos-upcoming-con-1788004927