fisk0

Yeah, Alone in the Dark isn't just in the same genre, but RE lifted some pretty notable scares from it, like the dog jumping through the window.

I've finished less than a hundred games in my lifetime, and own over 2000 games on both GOG and Steam, and given that I haven't felt like playing much in the last few years that obviously means I'd need to have over 5000 in order to actually like games.

Watched the French-Senegalese world war 1 film "Father & Soldier" (Tirailleurs) a few weeks ago. Interesting premise with a father and son from a Senegalese village who are forcibly "recruited" by the French to fight on the western front in 1917, with the two trying to find the means to return home. Sadly that premise is squandered by editing that jumps around wildly in time, never letting us know any of the characters, barely letting us know what's going on in the war, and being pretty poor at building tension. Lots of people just running around in the open without the slighest hint of the mud, snipers, gas and mines that tends to be all over WW1 stories. All around it's weirdly anonymously presented despite being such a personal story. 3-ish/5

The only 2023 release I've played so far has been The Last Spell. I guess it'll win by default, even though it's kinda just fine. Good strategy layer let down by the worst aspects of run based games where you have to lose several times in order to progress, like you don't even unlock defensive structures until after you've died once. It's way too much of a grind, but I'm still having fun with the combat.

Been kinda obsessed with V-Kaos recently. Awful name aside, she was Diabolicum's keyboardist and female vocalist, as well as live guitarist for Asagraum, and her solo stuff is incredible. Just raw black metal, mostly without drums or anything else unnecessary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFgOOaYFnDo

@deadweezel: the hard part is to make the lines perfectly vertical, but essentially all you have to do is to breathe on your phone's camera lens and then wipe it with your hand, leaving it slightly dirty and wet. The angle you wipe it at will affect the direction of the light 'beams'. You may want to put some protective film on the lens or use an old camera where it doesn't matter if you scratch it since you'll need to redo it a few times in order to get the right look.

Once you get close enough you can always just record and then crop and rotate the video a little during editing. That'll of course give you even more of that digital zoom look (and then use pretty heavy compression to make the look even dirtier).

Your best results will probably be with some cheap android phones or tablets, no fancy Samsungs or stuff like that (except maybe their cheaper Galaxy Ax line). You want as cheap and bad cameras as you can get.

People seem to forget that every Battlefield launch in the last 10 years has been disastrous. Battlefield 4 is fondly remembered now, but it was completely broken for a year, to the point that EA had to apologize for the state of the game (and got a place in Giant Bomb's 2013 GOTY awards in the "Please Stop" category - "Games That Require Post-Launch Apologies").

I'll say some of the earlier Civilization games (especially Civilization II: Test of Time, Call to Power and Call to Power 2) had much more in-depth environmental mechanics than the more recent ones, though Gathering Storm for VI is a bit of a return to form.

Maxis' Sim Isle also comes to mind. It tries to simulate an island ecosystem, though the scenarios are all kinda balanced towards letting the player "sustainably" turn every island into a shopping mall or golf course, which is a bit of a bummer, because there seems to be a bit more than that to the actual simulation.

We also have the 2021 release of Imagine Earth, which tries to have an environmentalist message though I'm not quite sold on how it works mechanically, it really just feels like you're balancing a few different meters, and you can find magical (ancient alien) sources of power that let you temporarily pause or even revert climate change.

When it comes to a more traditional RTS, I might actually also suggest Total Annihilation. It doesn't really have an environmental model, but if you don't play on one of the metal maps (which gives you infinite access to metal all over the map), there are some interesting quirks in how it handles resources that makes you start recycling the wrecks of fallen units as well as clear the map of trees and rocks to power the war economy. It also has a rudimentary fire simulation going on, that like C&C will have forest fires spread across the map and damage nearby units. Like, it's not deep environmental simulation by the metrics of some of these other games, but few RTS games have anything even close to this.

I'm not sure it was a direct causal relationship, but, yeah, I haven't played anything in months and haven't felt like playing anything either.

I have an 'essential job' though, so I was never off work, couldn't work from home and still had to meet hundreds if not a thousand people daily, and was rather overwhelmed with stuff for a good part of last year, got covid twice and we only got to use masks in the last 8 months or so.

The Norwegian jazz musician Nils Petter Molvær put out a new album this year, and I've been kinda obsessed with the single "Nearly Invisible Stitches". Back in the 90s he was one of the pioneers of future jazz, incorporating elements of drum and bass. This most recent album leans a bit more towards progressive rock-ish vibes, but the electronic elements are still in there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wKEvdqgOaE