Comments on: 2014′s A Goner

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:55:40 +0000

Week later I’m sorry I’ve recommended Lords of Xulima. It reminded me of your review of Banner Saga. It’s not fun. I wanted to try it before Legends of Grimrock cause it has turn-based combat. But no. It’s adequate, well-thought, efficiently implemented factory of boringness.

By: everblue650

everblue650 — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 10:58:10 +0000

Starbound? Still in beta but I have fired it up recently and it looks promising.

Prison Architect?

Niddhogg?

Heroes of the Storm?

By: innokenti

innokenti — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 18:01:00 +0000

I’ve been sporadically playing the HD version in Russian, but I’ll pop it on English and check out if they’ve made a better effort. Certainly the last couple of King’s Bounty games have had a better English translation, so I think there’s some hope.

I do love Space Rangers – still really hits the spot in all that it offers.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:54:22 +0000

They’re still greedy as hell. It’s a Winter Sale, the game is almost 5 years old, the last addon is 7 months old and they ask for 60 bucks without any price drop. For those money you could get everything Amplitude has to offer and Sins of Solar Empire on top of that. And the game itself is technically horrible. It really looks like it was made to prove you can’t make games with .NET. Or if you do at least don’t use default windows alerts and prompts. And let user choose resolution. Or at least make fonts larger than 9pt. Argh.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:44:28 +0000

They were called Dominators, yeah.

They’ve made HD version with massive additions to the game. Also they say the game is translated properly this time – which is probably true, it took them several month to add English language after they’ve put Russian one on Steam. I haven’t checked it myself cause it’s a rare occassion when I can play the game in a language I think in without throwing up – Google Translate is still ruling over non-major game releases in Russian, and even major ones suffer from technical and quality problems.

Anyway, Steam negative responses do not mention any translation problems so I guess they’ve done it right this time.

Another recent game is Lords of Xulima, which is again odschool RPG so everyone can call you not hardcore enough if something goes wrong.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:25:57 +0000

Alien Isolation looks like the archetypical week-long game – I’m not expecting to blast through it in a day (and if I did I suspect I’d be doing it wrong), but if it lasts longer than a week of evenings I’ll be surprised.

Steam Sales are a bit tricky for me because about a year ago I instituted a loose rule of not buying anything “for later”. I have too many games on Steam that I’ve bought that way and ended up never playing. So I only go for stuff I’m immediately interested in, and since Steam sales are cyclical I already own most of the interesting stuff.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:21:56 +0000

(Also “Russian Christmas” is largely for the benefit of Innokenti, but happy Orthodox Christmas to anyone else who celebrates it. )

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:20:50 +0000

Dominions 4 is one of those games that’s too big for me to invest the time learning how to play it. I mean, it looks right up my alley, I just don’t like the idea of playing it for twenty hours to figure it out (which is like a week’s worth of free time these days) and then realising that I do not, in fact, like it that much.

The Talos Principle probably isn’t happening. Neo Scavenger, This War of Mine and Shovel Knight probably will – but again, I think I’ll have to be in the right mood for them.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:17:02 +0000

My main objection to Distant Worlds was that the consensus was that you also had to buy one or more expansion packs to make it really worthwhile, and while it was being sold from Slitherine’s website this was incredibly expensive. Now that the entire package is on Steam for £45 it might be worth looking into.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 12:14:49 +0000

I have actually played all of these games to a greater or lesser degree!

Dungeon of the Endless I played for about fifteen minutes and came away extremely baffled, but I do intend to go back to it when I’m more in the mood.

Infested Planet I got about two-thirds of the way through. It was pleasant enough up to that point, but eventually the aliens got so tough that each mission was just a matter of inching closer and closer towards whatever my objective was under an umbrella of siege cannon fire.

And Dragonfall was a big improvement on Shadowrun, but I think I played it a little too soon after the first game. I’ll leave that one another month or two before taking another crack at it.

Space Rangers, god, that takes me back. My defining memory of Space Rangers is taking twenty minutes out from trying to defeat the evil cube-things (Annihilators?) to play a text adventure where I was running a ski resort. Unfortunately they’d been run through Google Translate to produce the English versions, so figuring out what the text adventure was about was sometimes as big a challenge as actually completing it.