PeezMachine

I've been trying to watch old I Love Mondays and the only way to get it to work is to explicitly open a new page for a video (right click on link to the video's page, open in new tab) -- using the carousel to go to another video doesn't work.

I would expect to see a lot of Tales From the Borderlands alumni on this list.

@xputnameherex: Oh man I totally had Hyper Scape in my head, classic goof. Well, as I said, no brand of multiplayer game is immune!

I often think of something Dave Lang said on an E3 at Nite appearance that was akin to "publishers are saying 'no more battle royale pitches, please' but a few months ago that's all they wanted."

Look, I was never the target audience for these things, both because of the battle royale structure and the game-as-service do-your-dailies forever-game parasitism, so I really don't have a horse in this race outside of how it affects the people who put in the labor to actually make the damn things, but I couldn't help but laugh a bit as I saw the endless wave of Johnny-come-lately battle royales from folks who thought they could make it big if they just made the right product. The product is irrelevant; it's better to be big than good, and that means having the resources to not just get that weekly Fortnite squad to dip into your game, but to keep making new keys to jingle in front of them so that they stay. The obvious comparison would be the WoW-chasing craze of 20 years ago, but even more recently we've seen multiplayer games of all stripes -- mobas, hero shooters, arena shooters -- learn that players are a finite resource, and most of them already have a church. So please, small and mid-size devs without huge publisher war chests: I love you, maybe make a really good single-player game instead.

Dead Space 3 was a totally fine horror-ish shooter, it just wasn't a very good Dead Space game. It fell into the classic sequel trap of needing to go bigger and louder, but Dead Space was always at its best when it was small and quiet -- that's how you make the big loud moments really pop.

Much as I reject the ontological argument for the existence of God, I reject the notion that the Amico must exist in order to be perfect.

I was going to say my all-time favorite experience with a game, The Talos Principle, but that's sitting at a Metacritic 85 so maybe the general population is warmer on it than I thought. So while I doubt that my transcendental time with the game is the norm, it's at least getting the quality of love it deserves.

So instead, as second runner-up: Surviving Mars. It's a weird (especially at launch before some of the more brutal early-game failure chains were reworked) and novel thing, but at the same time is the best of the post-Banished settlement builders, and one of the few such games where disasters don't just feel like arbitrary punishments, but instead actively drive decision-making. I guess while we're here, shoutout to another Haemimont joint, Victor Vran, a little hack-and-slasher that does more with less and mastered the art of the gamepad ARPG well before the console versions of Diablo 3 dropped.

First runner-up: Vault of the Void. Maybe this is more an issue of exposure than opinion, but it's criminal that this hasn't supplanted Slay the Spire as the rougelike deck-battler of record, though honestly that should have happened already with Griftlands and Roguebook. Even still, Vault of the Void is a step above in how it offers so much more control (both within a battle and in terms of deck building) and allows you to actually plan a bit for your next turn instead of leaving it entirely up to the draw.

My winner: Reus. It's a fun little god game. You play it for a few hours, you get caught in the loop of unlocking new resources for future runs by hitting achievements, and you put it down and move on with your life. OR.... you stick with (because it's really good and each session is a nice fixed length and the progression system encourages experimentation) and get to the last set of challenges, which have very specific conditions. So before you even get going, you map out how many of each ambassador type each giant will need to give you access to the resources you'll need. Then, since ambassadors have to be assigned fairly evenly, you determine the order in which giant will receive each ambassador. Then you determine how many cities from each biome you will need, and order them properly, keeping in mind that you'll want to upgrade 4 cities once before you upgrade any city twice (due to how ambassador unlocks work). All of this info fits onto a sticky note, which sits on your desk on top of a stack of other such notes, blueprints that fit the outline for a 120-minute session into the amount of space usually reserved for something pithy and direct, like "meeting: 3 PM"; the early ones have a 4x4 grid, the later ones streamline the information even further into a simple list of letter-pairs indicating ambassador assignments. You're 26 and unemployed, having just left the only career you've ever known, and one you thought you'd be doing for the rest of your life. The game finishes loading. You look at your notes: we start with a forest city, but careful not to let it get too big -- we need to pack 7 cities into the map on this run.

Sometimes I like to just mill about the Sapienza level of Hitman (2016). The cafe and beachfront areas are nice little areas to grab a seat and catch a little bit of a sleepy Italian seaside town.

It's a clicker only you don't click.

@whitestripes09: Nah I'm with you on Dwarf Fortress. Picked up the Steam version and feel completely burned. Granted, I'm not far enough in to get to the "craaaaazy stories!" part, but I feel such a disconnect between my actions and what's happening that even if those stories start popping off, I fail to see how I could be emotionally connected to them. It feels like when someone else is describing their dream (I've played a bit of the demo of Austin-beloved Unexplored 2, but I'm wary about pulling the trigger only to get burned by another "mechanically dubious but potentially compelling" game).

Also with you on The Outer Worlds, which I rushed to pick up when our Resident Cynics Brad and Jeff gushed about it. That game was doomed within the first 10 minutes, where you're woken up, thrown into a conflict you don't understand and don't see, and are told you have to steal a battery from one of two towns, dooming them so your ship can fly, when the correct answer is "hey buddy I have no understanding of this predicament or the stakes, you just woke me up and seem really frazzled, your ship can rot." Things would only get sloppier from there...