Okay, tried a few more and I have thoughts.

Townseek - Very bright and appealing. Good art style and the world is whimsical. But it throws a LOT of information and tasks at you right away which can be overwhelming, and it's kind of hard to get to know the characters since you're so busy with quests and trading. World seems very....small, given you're in a pretty fast airship. Could be a gem with some development. Didn't work properly with Steam Controller.

Dungeon Drafters - Pretty standard mystery dungeon with a deckbuilding mechanic. Kinda cute and mechanics seem solid, although I didn't know there's no reshuffling your deck. So when you run out of cards, I guess you just wait for the monsters to kill you? Frustrating in that sense. Didn't recognize Steam Controller.

Planet of Lana - Very pretty. Solid mechanics, characters seem likeable and well animated, puzzles make intuitive sense. A lot in common with games like Out of This World and Limbo, but not nearly so gruesome, even though you can die fairly easily. When I tried to alt-tab to another window, when I came back I got sound on a black screen that I couldn't get rid of without forcing Steam to quit. Not happy about that.

Plan B: Terraform - Same problem as Philadelphus. Unresponsive black screen (same as when alt-tabbing on Planet of Lana) on startup. Adding the startup command he did seemed to solve it, although I wasn't using Proton Experimental. As to the actual game, about what it says on the tin. Build industry and then terraform. Good mechanics, although the tutorial isn't as helpful as I'd like (why do I need to build 10 extractors all at once?).

Radio the Universe - Solid post-apocalyptic action-RPG with robots. Very mysterious setting and only one surreal cutscene for background. Great mechanics. Lo-fi, glitchy aesthetic so can be hard on the eyes, but a lot of fun.

Desynced - Worked great out of the box. A lot of mechanics reminiscent of stuff like Starcraft (set up mining, make drones, etc.). I think the real focus is on automating your drones and production, although I barely touched on that. Very nice style, fun once I started to figure out what was going on. Someone smarter than me (a low bar) would pick it up pretty quick, I think.

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Tried Townseek, and there's a lot good there. But it throws a lot of info at you immediately, and has really annoying chat and UI sounds that just irritate the hell out of me. I think maybe it's a bit dense on the text for an otherwise cute and chill game.

Also tried Dungeon Drafters. It's also pretty cute, and seems to have some good ideas, but I ran afoul of the fact that there seems to be no re-deal mechanic. Basically once you've used your cards, you just have to sit there and let the monsters kill you I guess.

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Tiny Life has been on Itch for quite a while now, I've had my eye on it. Not that I ever played The Sims in the first place, but this seems like a good implementation of the idea.

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Quoting: Luke_Nukem

Quoting: NezchanIf the dev went back and overhauled it the way the No Man's Sky devs did? I'd still be willing to give it a chance, after all this time. But it'll take a little more than what this update has to offer.

The dev struggles with money flow in many cases - I'd be very surprised if they could do what the NMS team managed.

Obviously I'm not talking about the scale of what they did. I mean the concept of coming back and picking a system, overhauling it and releasing that change, bit by bit.

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I wanted so badly for this game to be good. Since the early days when it first went on Steam in what was basically Early Access, although I'm not sure it was even called that yet. But colonists not doing tasks, dying with alarming regularity from lack of sleep while standing next to their beds, fires appearing for no apparent reason and the little robot thing that got added later not really making that much sense, that stuff finally killed my enthusiasm to keep trying. Never saw any word that any of that really improved all that much.

If the dev went back and overhauled it the way the No Man's Sky devs did? I'd still be willing to give it a chance, after all this time. But it'll take a little more than what this update has to offer.

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Meh. I'm Gen X and there doesn't seem to be much of anything that appeals to me.

A lot of that older stuff just isn't my thing in the first place; I'm much more into the modern indie scene. They can keep their collection of Duke Nukem variants.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: Purple Library GuyHm. This is one of those ones where I can't decide if it's nice that they updated it, or if it will just kind of ruin my nostalgia.

This kind of reminds me of how generations had their own imaginations' versions of what Hobbits looked like, but those who came along after the Hollywood Lord of the Rings movies tend to see them as Elijah Wood with big feet and funny clothes. :tongue:

Yeah . . . although to be fair, as a massive LoTR fan I found that most of the Peter Jackson representations did amazingly little violence to my existing notions of how Middle Earth is. Exceptions: Paths of the Dead, Shelob's lair, to some extent Elrond, Denethor, in a way Eowyn (I liked the movies' Eowyn, but I was picturing someone slimmer and wirier and grimmer), the Mouth of Sauron. But those are far less major worries than I was expecting.

The Ralph Bakshi ones definitely had big feet and goofy clothes over the Peter Jackson interpretation. Though they definitely 'borrowed' some of the scenes directly from that version!

My biggest disappointment with the Jackson trilogy is the treetment (pun intended) of the Ents. The extended version made it seem a little bit better, but still seemed to do a disservice to them deciding on their own that they should help.

Ugh, the Bakshi.
The Ents . . . won't disagree with that criticism, but in some ways they were executed better than I dared hope. I love the ents, but I can see where it would be amazingly hard to do them without seeming totally hokey. Like, they come off great in your imagination in a book, but getting their cool qualities across on film, oh man. There's something about walking talking trees in a visual medium that wants to be goofy. I thought on that front, managing to make them feel like something serious and even dangerous, the movie succeeded surprisingly well. Their Isengard scene rocked pretty hard.

So you thought the boobie tree from The Last Unicorn was goofy looking? How dare you, sir!:tongue:

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So did they dumb down the Villager AI to make them as suicidal as they tend to be in Minecraft?

Like the pathing has to make a beeline for things they can fall off of, for immersion's sake.

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Honestly I've only puttered around in Mineclone 2 the way it's presented. But I have done CallMeKevin's One Chunk Challenge a few times using it, because I don't have (or see the need for) official Minecraft, but wanted the same experience and mechanics as the original videos on the challenge.

That said, I am interested in digging deeper into it. Now that they've got their original benchmark (1.14, I think?) pretty much locked down and have moved on to the more modern stuff like the newer mobs, blocks, biomes and so forth, it looks like a lot of fun.

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Weird not to see Shovel Knight, tbh. There was a point where any crossover like this would have them, just by default.

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