Quoting: Purple Library GuySay, Philadelphus, you look kind of different. I could swear you used to be a lot more green, and less anthropomorphic.

New year, new me! [External Link] Okay, it's almost 4 months late, but, still! :happy:

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I think I'd be afraid to touch it, since my brain would keep thinking I'm about to short out some sensitive electronic doohickey. :grin:

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Quoting: anewsonSeen this game a lot on Twitch lately, but had no idea what was going on. Enjoyed the writeup, thanks. Just me or are there a lot of Mars games coming out lately? Red Planet Farming and Planet Crafter come to mind.

Cheers! That does seem to be the case. There's also Ad Astra Per Aspera, which came out in 2020.

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Well, Surviving Mars was only published by Paradox, not developed by them, but even their in-house developed grand-strategy games all play quite differently despite the superficial similarities. I personally really enjoy Europa Universalis IV and Stellaris*, but have mostly bounced off Crusader Kings II and Hearts of Iron IV. Some people enjoy all of them, others find only one or two really "click".

*And Surviving Mars to an extent, though I think mostly because I got it when the Green Mars expansion came out; without that long-term reward of watching the planet get terraformed I don't think I'd enjoy it as much.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: ElectricPrismAlso, while Portal 2 dwarfs Portal 1 in popularity and review score, I am one of the few holding fast that Portal 1 was superior. If they do undertake a Portal 3 I would like for them to return to the calculated cold mechanical sociopathic GlaDOS inspired by System Shock's Shodan instead of the Portal 2 one which just "called you fat" and used other low-blow humor. Everything else about Portal 2 was phenomenal except they got the personality profile on GlaDOS slightly wrong. Wrong enough to hit a nerve.

Well, the last 30 seconds of the ending of Portal 2 offers a prime opportunity to recalibrate GLaDOS's personality a bit… :whistle:

But, I mean, I get the difficulty Valve is in here. Portal had a final boss fight where you take personality cores off the boss. Portal 2 had a final boss fight where you put personality cores on the boss. Where could they possibly go from here?? :tongue:

Hot-swap personality cores? :wink:

That actually sounds interesting. In the first two games the order you take/put cores is linear; now imagine a game where you have, say, three cores (as per tradition), but the final battle goes very differently depending on the order you choose to swap them in. Six different permutations of a final boss battle! :shock: (How's that for replayability? :wink:)

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Quantum Catapults sound like fun. :grin: The Subterranean origin sounds interesting as well, depending on how it works.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismAlso, while Portal 2 dwarfs Portal 1 in popularity and review score, I am one of the few holding fast that Portal 1 was superior. If they do undertake a Portal 3 I would like for them to return to the calculated cold mechanical sociopathic GlaDOS inspired by System Shock's Shodan instead of the Portal 2 one which just "called you fat" and used other low-blow humor. Everything else about Portal 2 was phenomenal except they got the personality profile on GlaDOS slightly wrong. Wrong enough to hit a nerve.

Well, the last 30 seconds of the ending of Portal 2 offers a prime opportunity to recalibrate GLaDOS's personality a bit… :whistle:

But, I mean, I get the difficulty Valve is in here. Portal had a final boss fight where you take personality cores off the boss. Portal 2 had a final boss fight where you put personality cores on the boss. Where could they possibly go from here?? :tongue:

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Quoting: slaapliedjeYeah, and Apple is just bordering on being openly hostile to game developers. Killing off 32-bit support, not keeping an up to date OpenGL, pushing Metal instead of providing Vulkan, etc.

It actually warms my heart to see games released for Linux and Windows natively, and macOS being skipped.

Last year when I moved internationally I only had my work-provided Macbook to game on for five months while my Linux desktop was shipping*, and I was shocked to realize just how few of my games were playable on MacOS. Well, ok, part of that was some games was not being playable due to its weak specs, but still…I've gotten so used to games Just Working on Linux with Proton, it was really surprising how many didn't have MacOS versions, and of course, no Proton-equivalent for Mac. If you filter on Steam by available OS, there are more games with Mac versions than Linux, but in terms of actually playable games, it's not even close.

*Don't move internationally during a global pandemic if you can help it, folks!

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The Martian trains pack sounds intriguing. It's still bonkers to me that the game originally launched without the dome-to-dome connector tunnels (though I only personally got it with Green Mars, after they were added in). Simulating people moving around the planet more for work and stuff sounds like it'll make things more interesting and dynamic, rather than having a bunch of insular domes that people only move between imperceptibly in shuttles.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: KristianI never understood the people that are under the impression that Valve has stopped developing games. Valve employees artists, level designers, game designers and the like. What do they imagine these people do if not work on games?

Dunno.

But if you look at the list of their games [External Link], there's large gaps.

Dota 2 in 2013, fine. Never heard of Counter-Strike Online 2, Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies, Left 4 Dead: Survivors (an expansion, I guess?) or The Lab (water testing for VR it seems). Than there's infamous Artifact in 2018. Of course, Dota e.g. needs work during its life. But I'm not overwhelmed, to be honest. What do you imagine these people were working on?

Game stuff that never gets released, maybe? Games tend to have a lot of prototyping (and Valve is notorious for going above and beyond in this) and experimental content that gets cut and not released.

Quoting: SkyGuyWhyWe're like the Egyptians. Building the pyramids through sheer brute force, dragging massive blocks of stone across the ground 10,000 slaves at a time. Meanwhile across the pond, the Romans have figured out this amazing thing called *wheels*. Don't be so quick to assume that if there's a better way, you'd be using it already!

Ok, I'm not a historian, but I have to point out some historical errors with this analogy: the pyramids in Egypt could not have been constructed* without some sophisticated engineering know-how**, because no number of humans (as in, without tools of some kind) would be able to move stone blocks of that size through sheer brute force. (There's a limit to how many people can fit around a rock to pick it up, after all [and friction precludes dragging/pushing]…) Also it's a common misconception that the pyramids were constructed with slave labor; more modern scholarship points out that the pyramids were constructed by well-paid specialist labor, with reports of workers even striking and getting better compensation. And yet when Saladin's son decided to destroy the pyramids of Giza in AD 1196 [External Link], the attempt was given up after 8 months due to the extreme difficulty involved in even deconstructing them, after accomplishing little more than a gash in the smallest of the three. Sometimes the earliest attempts to do something, though not as good as that which will come later, can already be pretty good. :smile:

*Over a thousand years before Rome was even a collection of huts on the banks of the Tiber, for reference; the great pyramids of Giza are as far removed in time from Cleopatra, as she was from us.

**Including the wheel; I can't imagine where the idea the Egyptians didn't have those is coming from—Egyptian chariots were the tanks of the Bronze Age, cutting-edge military hardware that was (rightly) feared throughout the surrounding world for centuries before Rome existed as a political entity. They even had an approximation of pi to better than 1% hundreds of years before the Greeks began theorizing about it.

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