BBAlpert

That's awesome to hear, because my secondhand understanding is that the past 10+ years has been nothing but a feedback loop of declining sales leading to doubling down on gouging customers in an attempt to make up for lost revenue which further hurt sales.

Speaking of which, did they ever wrap up the Horus Heresy novels? Or is the Eisenstein STILL on its way to Terra?

In most other respects, this game looks like a more fully developed, fully featured Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, but there's one thing I really like in (the alpha version of) TABS. As shown on the most recent UPF, it's got a series of puzzle-like levels that present an enemy army and say "use this budget to beat that army".

I've been thinking about getting UEBS or waiting for TABS to come out, and right now the deciding factor is whether or not UEBS has any similar single player stuff.

Thanks!

One thing I'd recommend is turning off minimap rotation in the options menu. The regular map doesn't have a set "default" orientation, so having at least the minimap fixed gives you a bit of reference for where stuff is. In other words, you can start to internalize that the camp is to the south, the desert is in the northwest, the bridge is to the east of the desert, etc.

(you do get fast travel relatively early on, but it's still helpful to have a general understanding of the map as you're running around)

I'm still hoping that Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden 2 will eventually come out.

I am positive that I'm forgetting a ton of games that are objectively better and/or more "important", but these are 10 games that stand out to me as games that have some personal value to me.

• Orcs Must Die!: OMD2 is a more fully featured game, and if I was sitting down to play, I'd probably pick that one, but OMD1 is a personal favorite still.
• Hitman: I'd have also definitely included Blood Money, if this were games from the last eleven years
• Europa Universalis III: In Nomine: I spent like 300+ hours with this game, including a campaign of dozens of hours conquering every* single territory on the map
• Kerbal Space Program: I learned so much playing this and I really do wish there were more games like it, for other fields of science/engineering.
• Heroes of Might and Magic V: Tribes of the East: I still think 5 is the best in the series. Sorry, 3.
• The Book of Unwritten Tales: I honestly think this may have edged out Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle as my all-time favorite adventure game. And that's saying a LOT.
• Hotline Miami: It looks, sounds, plays, and just FEELS amazing.
• Portal: I cannot think of a single bad thing about this game. The only "flaw" would be that it spawned some obnoxious memes, but that's not a problem with the game itself.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: This is where all the disparate parts and systems and mechanics fell into place perfectly. In other words, it's the Fast Five of the Assassin's Creed series.
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: This game is simply something special.

*I conquered every territory in North America, I conquered every territory in South America, I conquered every territory in Africa, I conquered every territory in Europe, I conquered every territory in Australia/surrounding Oceania, and I conquered every territory in Asia exceptfor Japan because of a fucking bug. I was using the Divine Wind expansion, which added a bunch of early-mid game systems for unifying China and Japan. The thing with unifying Japan (and maybe also China) in EU3:DW is that until the Hojo and Tokugawa and Ashikaga and Minamoto and all the other clans finished fighting each other and merged into a singular "Japan", those territories couldn't be captured by foreign powers. But for whatever reason, in my game that never happened. The AI for the clans broke or something and just sat there not doing anything. My invincible, unstoppable invasion fleet just floated in the docks of Busan, South Korea (or I suppose at that point I think it was Busan, France) for 60 years until the game time ran out in 1821.

I'm still mad about that.

So we're on the same page, which of the following qualify as "first direct sequels"? (note: I'm not asking if or suggesting that they are "worse" games)

• Modern Warfare 2 (also, Black Ops 2)
• Assassin's Creed 2: Brotherhood
• Yoshi's Island (because it was marketed outside Japan as "Super Mario World 2")
• Dynasty Warriors 2 (because DW2 wasn't a sequel to DW/Sangoku Musou in Japan, it was the start of a new Shin Sangoku Musou series)
• Dynasty Warriors 3 (because DW3 was a sequel in Japan, as Shin Sangoku Musou 2)

Portal 2 (I liked Portal 2 a lot, but I still think the first game was better overall)

I also think a similar "the sequel was still very, very good but the original was impossible to live up to" argument could potentially be made for StarCraft 2.

*edit: Oh, and this one may or may not be controversial, but I'll throw Metal Gear Solid 2 in for the sake of discussion*

I don't know if this QUITE counts as entirely positive, but the humor in Thimbleweed Parkdoes stop being completely unbearable after about an hour or so. It turns out there's a pretty decent adventure game in there, once you get past the initial onslaught of smarmy, 4th wall breaking, masturbatory*, self-referential jokes.

*Not masturbatory in that the jokes are about masturbation, but in the sense that a lot of the jokes/references are about how LucasArts adventure games were so much better than Sierra adventure games and how cool and popular and handsome Ron Gilbert is/was.

@giant_gamer said:

It depends on what you mean by "stuck" (I think I know which way you mean, but just in case)...

If you mean stuck as in "I don't know what to do next", then yes. There are some tricky puzzles, if memory serves.

If you mean stuck as in "I did something that I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do and now I literally cannot progress any further with this save file", then no. There MIIIIIGHT be one or two exceptions, but this was well into the period where LucasArts adventures avoided fucking the player over like that. The original Maniac Mansion, on the other hand, was FAR less forgiving in that regard.

My one main criticism of Sapienza is that it's kind of a hassle to have to keep doing the "Destroy the virus" objective over and over as you replay the level to complete the various challenges. Granted, this really only applies for professional difficulty, where you can't simply save -> do unique challenge kill -> reload and complete a bunch of challenges in a single run. And even then, it's still not as bad as Colorado's "there's only one exit to this level" (in the story mission, at least).

Still, my ranking would have to be

1. Sapienza
2. Paris/Hokkaido*
3. Marrakesh**
4. Bangkok
5. Colorado

*I feel like Hokkaido could have taken the top spot if not for the fact that it's just so much smaller than Paris or Sapienza.

**I initially put Marrakesh below Bangkok, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it's biggest problem is simply that it feels disjointed. None of the 3 major areas in the level are particularly bad, they just feel too isolated from each other. I almost wonder if the game was going to have smaller levels (but more of them), and the school/streets/consulate were originally designed as separate maps.