Is this a They Are Billions prequel? :P

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: UltraVioletWouldn’t be better to have all the games in all the sections?

Thaumistry in Best Audio?
Rocket League in best FOSS project?
Cheeseness in Best Game?

No, seriously: some games qualify among the best in some categories, others don:t. That's what the nomination phase was good for.

I would totally play competitive Cheeseness.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Should Hellpoint be on the "most anticipated for 2018" list when the release date is early 2019?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShmerlFor best audio I voted for Owlboy. Though otherwise I would have voted for West of Loathing. It has a great soundtrack and came out on GOG for Linux in 2017.

That's the thing, West of Loathing and Pyre both have outstanding music in their own ways, but the sound design of The Long Dark is critical to establishing the atmosphere and succeeds to a huge degree. So how do you make that choice between effective environmental work and good music? Sure they're both audio, but otherwise they're entirely different concepts.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Does "Best Audio" mean "Best Soundtrack" or "Best Sound Engineering". Those are sort of apples and oranges in their way.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Hm. Seems like the sort of thing that would be a better fit at Itch.io than Steam, where it's likely to quickly get lost.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Current suggestions for the next livestream project:

West of Loathing
Shadow Warrior
Dreadout
Darkwood
Flashpoint
Bard's Tale

View this comment - View article - View full comments

You no take candle!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Kels

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: KelsI shouldn't have played Kingdom: Classic to see how it runs on my system.

On the plus side, I managed to make it to day XXXII on my third attempt before everything suddenly fell apart.

I don't get it. I tried to watch a few gameplays on youtube but they were confusing. What's the appeal of this genre of deliberately badly drawn 2d side-scrolling games? I am sorry if this question feels like trolling but this is the way I see it.

Well, when you're stacking the deck with the "deliberately badly drawn" assumption right from the start, I can see how you wouldn't enjoy anything like it. It's hard to see the appeal to anything when you slam your mind shut before you even approach it.

As to the game itself, I've found that actually doing the tasks, and dealing with an ever larger area that needs to be looked after, is much different than just watching. I personally find it absorbing and the graphics, yes done in a deliberately limited style but I personally value those sorts of limitations, is appropriate to the game's atmosphere.

But I'm not here to sell you on something that you seem predisposed against, and could have just tried yourself for free anyway. If you don't wanna play, you don't wanna play.

Ok. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to try and tell me one aspect of your take on it. To be frank, the "retro"-style of some games turns me off because I played a lot of games in the 80s and 90s, and I felt quite limited by these graphics. Since we are in a time of photorealistic 3D gameplay, people mimicking the limitations of old times seem like a bad joke, or some conservatism against actual, objective improvements. Maybe you are right and I created a mental blockade against this, but when I played 2012 XCOM, I found it amazing that they modernized the game and did not miss the essence of it with much better graphics.

I'd say "much better" is something of a matter of taste, not "objective improvements". Not that I dislike modern XCOM, but frankly I quickly get bored with photorealistic graphics pretty quickly. In my case I want to see stuff that was designed by artists, that suits the mood of the game. Salt & Sanctuary, for instance, accomplishes this very well. You can see the hand of the artist in everything about the game. Slime Rancher is the same way, everything in the environment is distinct and internally consistent. Or Borderlands. Or Kingdom.

As to mimicking limitations, as a creative myself I can speak directly to that. Sometimes setting limits on yourself can produce some really amazing results. Whether that's drawing with a limited colour palette or writing a whole story in under 200 words or 140 characters, you force yourself to make sometimes dramatic decisions about your work. The same goes for choosing to work with pixel art or a 16-bit style. There's a challenge to see how much you can push those restrictions, and some people achieve amazing results. Some of the tableaus in Hyper Light Drifter are absolutely stunning.

In addition, there's how the human brain works. It's a common lament among artists that an inked piece doesn't look as dynamic as the sketch that it's based on did. And that's because in the sketch, your brain is filling in details that haven't been set down firmly yet. You might have two or three or five lines, and by choosing one as the one you'll keep, you pin things down and a little of that energy flows away. In Kingdom, the same effect is in play. There's a lack of detail, so as you play and concentrate on other things besides the graphics (Can I afford to build this guard tower? Do I have enough archers?) your brain is working in the background to fill in details because it has the space to do so. Not everything is defined. This isn't necessarily the case for all pixel-based games, but it feels to me like it is for Kingdom.

That's not to say that nostalgia and "good old days"-ism isn't a factor, but I don't think it always is, nor is it the most important one to consider.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Can't say the trailer really grabs me. It's well rendered to be sure, but "You get to walk down new and interesting hallways" set to music that suggests something more dramatic is happening leaves me kinda cold.

And then there's the entering commands via "terminals" thing which makes it sound like the pretty environments really don't have much to do with the actual gameplay.

View this comment - View article - View full comments