I don't play Minecraft, so this is all seeming very weird to me. "Can't craft saddles" on its own just seems like a bad oversight, and like surely there's a mod for this, right? But then it's supposed to be OK because you . . . hunt for them? So like, you stealth up to a wild saddle and put an arrow through it before it can get away? Um, sure. Can you breed them? Catch some wild saddles and domesticate them, end up with a herd of saddles in your corral?

Mostly it was a cool new thing to search for when saddles were shiny and new, but I think making them craftable is a good move. Before if you wanted saddles then you had to go search or fish for them (regardless of if you wanted to do that or not), and if you didn't care about using them but liked exploring or fishing you eventually ended with a ton of them, all useless to you. Now people who want saddles can just craft them, and explorers can get more useful raw materials. (And yes, mods that made saddles craftable and ones that introduced ways to break them down into raw materials have both existed for over a decade now.)

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A quick follow-up release came after, as Valve forgot to allow you to join your own server if it was set to Friends Only, because you can't be your own Steam Friend. Oops.

Ha! That's pretty funny. :grin:

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Pops? In my Europa Universalis? :grin:

Ah, the sequel to the title that introduced me to Paradox grand strategy games and subsequent thousands of hours of gameplay. Money's a bit tight this year so we'll see if/when I get a chance to pick it up, but it certainly sounds promising.

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This reminds me of Webbed (which was fun), except in 3D instead of 2D.

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Preliminary patch notes (major features only) can be found at this April 30 dev diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/stellaris-dev-diary-382-the-next-step-in-evolution.1738361/
They note that:

There are about 9000 lines in the export log for us to go through to get you the rest, sorry we couldn’t get them sorted by this dev diary!

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Nice. Most of these fixes seem fairly minor*, but I bet this is a pilot for Valve incorporating community fixes going forward. And even a bunch of small fixes are great! Can't wait to see where this goes. :smile:

*With 'seem' and 'fairly' doing some heavy lifting there, and not to disparage anyone's effort in making them.

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PlateUp! is fantastic and I can't recommend it highly enough. In much the same way that FTL introduced roguelike mechanics to the "being a spaceship captain" genre, PlateUp! introduces them to the restaurant management genre. I got it a few months after it released in August 2022 and have over 150 hours in it so far. It runs flawlessly in Proton (I've often wished it got a native Linux version just so I could submit an article here about it), and it controls excellently on the Deck – I've spent probably dozens of hours playing it on mine (and on my desktop, it works equally well with mouse & keyboard and a controller in my opinion, due to its simple control scheme of movement + four buttons).

Basically, you have a little restaurant where customers come in and you have to take their orders and serve them. As days pass more customers arrive, and every third day you get a choice of two possible options to take which increase the difficulty in some way, though often with a slight customer reduction (one will be a new food dish to serve, the other is usually some sort of customer behavior or modifier). If a single customer's patience bar ever fully depletes your run is over and your restaurant gets shut down, with you goal to survive 15 days (which lets you set up a "franchise," choosing some of the options you took to do a New Game Plus run. You can keep going into Overtime after day 15, however, and I've personally made it to Overtime day 22 using the game's other main feature: automation.

With the money you earn each day, you can buy a variety of appliances which allow you to automate food production. It starts simple, like a mixer which can automatically chop ingredients or a portioner which automatically takes portions from larger dishes like soups, but eventually you're designing complex systems which can handle multiple ingredients, chopping and heating and combining them into a finished product, all borne along by conveyor belts (perhaps all the way out of the kitchen to waiting customers!). I'm not 100% sure if every dish in the game can be automated, but it wouldn't surprise me and an astonishing number of them can be. Designing a Factorio-like layout to optimize production efficiency and extend your route just one more day is its own flavor of addicting. (I find games like Factorio and Satisfactory fun, but they quickly become too complicated for my brain to handle once they extend beyond what I can see all at once. In PlateUp!, there's a pretty high level of complexity that can be attained, but it all always fits on one screen, which keeps it manageable.)

And while it can be played solo, it truly shines in multiplayer, where you get to find out how good you and friends are under pressure when there are three customers waiting impatiently outside in the snow, table 4 still hasn't had their onion soup served yet, and will someone please clean up the customer's mess on the floor because it's slowing everyone doing front-of-house down, and also I said they needed a medium steak on table 2, not a well-done…! :grin:

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With what looks like unique characters this has XCOM: Chimera Squad vibes. Which I thought was an interesting take on the basic gameplay of XCOM and a fun time, even if I didn't end up playing it as much XCOM 2 overall. Could be good, we'll see! Though I'll wait for it to release before getting my hopes up.

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I was already somewhat thinking it with the insectile design but I saw the "Crawling Olives" in the trailer and my mind immediately went to "Kinda bug, and kinda snack…" :grin:

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This is supposed to be Valve's version of 'Fortnite: Battle Royale', isn't it?

Or is it completely different?

I'm unclear on what "this" refers to here – Mann vs. Machine? Team Fortress 2 as a whole? I've not played Fortnite, but it sounds like the closest thing to it in TF 2 would be Arena mode, where two 12-player teams compete to be the last man standing. But I get the feeling that's one of the less popular modes (I haven't played it in probably close to a decade), so there's not much overlap.

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