For Honor is having a free week(end on August 3rd) and have also released a new hero, the Ocelotl.

The Ocelotl comes equipped with a Macuahuitl club and Tepoztopilli spear, using these to have infinite chained attacks, and a few bash attacks. He is a hybrid, described as a ganker and disabled. His feats makes it so at tier 1 when he dies, he can move in spirit form and respawn wherever after 10 seconds, but with very little health. The longer you wait to respawn, the more health you have. The tier 2 is a complement to this, so the enemy that killed you is marked, and tier 3 increases attack speed and damage done, after you kill someone. Tier 4 is a spear attack, which drags an enemy towards you and inflict bleed.

I have tried the new hero out and overall, finds him relatively balanced. While his feats adds a new form of stress, his actual moveset is okay. It isn't stupidly OP, nor is it weak. It's pretty smackdabb in the middle, imo. Also, his feats are an inderect buff to heavy heroes, as boosting a zone is important, so the Ocelotl doesn't respawn in you back zones. This makes it so heavies can more easily build up renown (they gain extra renown from boosting), while also adding surprise attacks. All in all, I like playing against the Ocelotl (as I main Warlord, and like boosting) and I also like playing a Ocelotl.

Welcome back to the third weekly game jam thread.

Whats a game jam you may ask. Well imagine if you locked a group of game developers in a box for box for some quantity of time ranging from a few days to a few weeks and told them to compete with each other by building something around a theme and then judging whatever each other came up with, that's a game jam.

Longtime viewers AKA the 5 people to who looked at the 2 previous threads will have no doubt noticed I missed last week. During an unusually normie weekend I was busy awkwardly standing in a corner at not 1 but 2 different parties and was super tired when I got back I did not want to write this up. I hope you can forgive me. To ensure that this does not happen again I am moving this thread to Sundays which should give me more time flexibility and something to look forward to instead of sitting around dreading the upcoming work week.

Also as a bit of compensation for your troubles today I am linking 2 top quality longer games that you can really sink your teeth into this week. I am 100% cool with someone discussing games from any week in future threads so don’t sweat the time commitment and don’t feel you have to finish the whole game before returning to discuss it. Quality video games shouldn’t have an expiration date.

With that said lets get into the this weeks games

Infinimall: Dream Job!

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android
Authors: Pandora
Genres: Visual Novel

Coming to you with love from the the folks in the the proverbial vaporwave-dreamworld-liminal-mall-urbex complex, Infinimall: Dream Job! Is a dating sim visual novel set inside a surreal mall and originally written for the NaNoRenNo 2023 Jam. Featuring the Doomer Girl like bisexual disaster Mia(I wonder if its the same Mia as Heart Beat) as she navigates a dead end job and tries to get her dead end life back on track.

According to my calculations the game has about 100 book pages worth of dialogue over all its branches which should be a breeze for the text-only titans that walk the halls of this site.

Hypnagogia

Platforms Windows
Authors: sodaraptor
Genres: Adventure

Our second game is also taking us to the dreamworld but this time its inspired by late 90s PSX aesthetics, in particular, the cult classic game LSD: Dream Emulator which is fitting given it comes from LSD Jam 2020. It centers on a gameplay loop of exploring diverse dream worlds inspired by dreams from the developers own dream diary. I think the game is best thought as a sort of drug trip or spiritual experience in the same way as something like Superliminal. Go in with an open mind and I think most people can get something from the experience. This goes double for the games sequel Hypnagogia 無限の夢 Boundless Dreams which is available without DRM on itch.io or with DRM on Steam if you are into that sort of thing.

However long it takes after you awaken from your strange dream let me know what you are thinking. Its okay I won’t die if you don’t like the same games I do though I will be sad. Its lonely walking the path of niche games but you can’t make friends if you never share.

PREVIOUS WEEK

I have fond memories of trying to solve HTML/text-based riddles on sites like WeffRiddles when I was growing up in the mid-late 2000s. The premise of the site is usually pretty simple: the landing page represents "level 1", and you had to find the correct URL to get to level 2, 3, and so on. The "puzzle/riddle" aspect usually involves inspecting the underlying HTML and looking through clues given in the source code, then using those clues to piece together the URL for the next stage.

It was always fun hanging out on forums and sharing clues about how to solve the level that everyone was stuck on. Also, being a kid back then, frankly I felt like a Hackerman™️ whenever I'd have to inspect the page source, paste it into Windows Notepad, then set font size to 1pt because I thought there was an ASCII art pattern hidden in the HTML. Good times.

Sometimes I get the urge to play these things again, but besides WeffRiddles which I know by name, I don't really know what this type of game is called. The closest "modern" example I can think of is /dev/esc, which is more like an online escape room than a long-form riddle site.

Does this ring a bell for you? Any other fun ones that you remember playing? And what the hell do I type into Google to find more of these?

Curious to see if there are any other sports sim fans around here. If you're not familiar with the genre, the two most popular and longest running are APBA Baseball/Football/Hockey and Strat-O-Matic Baseball/Football/Hockey. Personally, I'm a big fan of Second Season Football and I'm playing with Back to Minnesota's 1965 season so I can bring Jim Brown and Cleveland back to glory!

If you've never heard of this before, think of these games as "story generators" where you can play two teams against each other and see how close the dice rolls and stats get to real life. I play as a sort of chill night where I listen to a baseball game or a podcast with a cup of coffee. Throwing dice around and watching Jim Brown plow through some poor defense is really enjoyable :)

You can also play head to head with another player! I highly recommend a smaller game like Pocket Pennant Run if you're interested in diving into games like this. A similar game would be Stone Cold Hockey for hockey fans and Fast Drive Football for football nerds like myself.

The biggest communities online are definitely the Delphi Forums for Tabletop Sports as well as the Digital to Dice Podcast Facebook page.

Digital versions of the APBA and Strat games exist, and there is a huge fanbase for the Action! PC Games, and a hugely popular game is Out of the Park Baseball which has simulator-like features but is mostly a baseball management game.

I’m a big fan of simple incremental/idle games to burn a few minutes on the bus, but most of the games for mobile are pretty low quality.

My all time favorite is easily Idle Apocalypse, but there are bound to be other good ones as well.

Hey y’all. Recently picked up a Cyberpower prebuilt. Looking to install a Linux distro on it for gaming. Currently have Ubuntu on my laptop, so I’m not a total noob, but my experience is still low. Not a big fan of having to use the terminal. Any distros y’all would recommend? Am leaning toward Pop_OS or SteamOS.

Interested to hear from anybody who plays Snap.

What's your thoughts on the current meta?

What do you find the Ghost Spider and Silk so far? Any other cards you're saving tokens ford?

Have you tried Conquest?

I'm mostly pretty casual. I'm free to play, and the highest rank I've reached is 70. I've been playing a my own attempt at a Sera Surfer deck lately (can't bring myself to net deck), and it's been pretty going well for me.

I've got mixed feelings about Conquest so far. Since you're matched up with the same player for several matches, it can be a bit more of a time commitment. And if you get an emote spammer, it can feel a it gruelling. But it helps me think about my matchups in more depth, which is actually kind of cool.

Hi friends,

I’ve been enjoying listening to audiobooks a lot lately but find I generally have to be doing something (e.g. going for a walk, doing dishes etc) while I listen to them since it would be strange to just sit in a chair and stare and if I closed my eyes I might fall asleep.

I have found a couple of mindless games I can play on my phone while listening that don’t distract me from the story such as temple run, desert golf and amazing brick, but I’d be interested if anyone else had any suggestions?

I’d also be open to more substantial games as well so long as they didn’t have a lot of dialogue or require a lot of brain power (I’ve found trying to solve chess puzzles while listening to the audiobook just distracts me too much from the book for example).

Thanks in advance!

It seems like every game these days is just some idle clicker or some other lazy game that tries to peddle in app purchases.

Is there anything that actually is worth playing still, for someone that usually plays PC games?

Hey y’all, welcome back to the second weekly game jam thread.

Whats a game jam you may ask. Well imagine if you locked a group of game developers in a box for box for some quantity of time ranging from a few days to a few weeks and told them to compete with each other by building something around a theme and then judging whatever each other came up with, that's a game jam.

Now you may ask why would anyone play these things besides the other game game jam entrants. I don’t know about everyone else but despite being one of the younger users on this site I can’t help but feel like I have to work very hard to find any sort of magic in my life and I keep telling myself if I just keep playing more games and scraping and scrounging at the fringes of the industry I can find the magic again and be happy for a little bit.

Its actually a little scary sharing these games with you guys. I know its unreasonable to get emotionally invested in tiny games I did not even make but it does make me happy that people are taking an interest in this thread. Here is what I have for you this week.

HeartBeat

Platforms: Windows, HTML5
Genres: Rhythm

Do you remember that one part in that one game that you like, during the final boss fight when the heroes theme is reprised and layers are added to the song for each stage of the boss fight and then the vocals kick in and its awesome. Here in game jam land our motto is “All killer no filler”, we like to skip to the good part and this entry from Boss Rush Jam 2023 fits the bill. Its the final boss battle of a rhythm game and features an unusual control scheme that takes a few tries to get the hang of. Let me know if this game jogs any memories of boss fights.

e-scape

Platforms: Windows
Genres: Simulation

If you talk to a gamer that has been around for awhile they will have a story to tell you about a game that they used to play that has since been shutdown. Its always the same story. They see an article out of the blue that the game they used to play just announced a shutdown date. They log in and like a traveler from an antique land, are greeted by a ghost town filled with statues of champions and kings soon to be buried forever at the command of a datacenter sysadmin.

That is e-scape, look on its works, ye mighty, and despair!

This week was both nostalgic and somber for me and that leaked into this weeks selection in a big way. I really do look forward to seeing peoples responses to this thread though and I hope to keep doing these threads for the foreseeable future.

PREVIOUS WEEK NEXT WEEK

This is an article I wrote on boardgames subreddit seven years ago, about a tournament game of Diplomacy which had lasted more than 3 years and was still ongoing at the time. It eventually ended in a draw with Italy leading, in Feb 2016, after 3 years and 7 months of play. I'm reposting it here because I'm quite proud of the article (and I want to move it away from Reddit) and because imo it still holds up as one of the greatest events in the history of Diplomacy and a very interesting event in niche internet history.

tl;dr - Seven players (less now that some have been eliminated) have been playing a game that simulates the First World War in a Tournament. They've been playing it so long that the First World War is now continuing on into the 21st Century. The game has been out for 57 years and this has never happened in a recorded game before.

If you are not familiar with Diplomacy, it's a war game based around negotiation where 7 players each play one Great Power in the First World War, attempting to gain control of Europe by taking key provinces known as Supply Centers. It's very similar to A Game of Thrones - The Board Game except that you can (usually) talk in private with other players and all players must submit orders for a phase before any are revealed, meaning that you don't know if your 'ally' will backstab you that phase or not until you've already set your orders. Other players can support your units into provinces, so negotiation is key to victory.

Everyone who knows about Diplomacy knows that it takes a ridiculously long time to play. In a face-to-face (FTF) tournament strict deadlines of 15 minutes per phase are set, and games are played from 1901 to 1908, meaning 4 hours for a game. In casual settings, where the timers aren't observed so harshly, a game of the same number of phases can take 8 hours.

Because of how difficult Diplomacy can be to start in real life, there are a lot of active communities for playing it online. In online play, phases are usually set to process every 2 days, and you only need to dedicate an hour or so a day to it. Because of this, the set end date (1908) used in most FTF games isn't needed, and the game can be played to the win condition stated in the rulebook - one great power controlling 18 Supply Centers - which isn't used much in FTF because it takes far too long to achieve. This in turn means that games can last months.

There's also the possibility of an 'eternal game' since there is no set end date. Usually, this is due to stalemates - there can be positions where no player can push any further forward, and no player can back off because another player can win as a result. These games are declared drawn, since no victory is possible.

However, there's a small possibility of a game that would go on forever while going back and forth, back and forth - one power gaining centers then being pushed back by the others, and then another, and so on, without the game being stalemated. In practice, this sort of thing rarely happens - going by statistics from webDiplomacy last year, out of ~43000 games completed, only 17 had legitimately passed 1930, and none of those had reached the year 1940.

The longest recorded completed game comes from another site and reached 1964 -note, I originally had a link to this game but it appears to now be dead. However, one non-completed game on webDiplomacy completely blows it out of the water.

The 2012 webDiplomacy World Cup Final has one game still ongoing, long after all the others have been completed. This game has just reached the year 2000! That is absolutely insane - if this had been a FTF game at a tournament, the participants would have been playing for just over two days straight. Since it's online, they have been playing for three and a half years.

I have checked with several important members of the Diplomacy community and it is indeed the first game ever to have legitimately done so (not just because some players decided to mess around until it reached that date).

Link to the game

What was/is the 2012 webDiplomacy World Cup?

The World Cup was an event held on webDiplomacy which mimicked the FTF Diplomacy Tournament that goes by the same name. Different countries (or regions, if there were not enough players in a country) would gather a group of players and play in a group of games with teams from 6 other regions, each having one player in each game, and gaining points based on how well they did in each game. The best countries/regions advanced from groups in a knockout style until the Final, which has not yet finished.

Why has it gone on so long?

That's a difficult question to give a straight answer to. It's a combination of several factors:

• These players are insanely good. The teams in question reached the final, and they picked their best participants at the Public Press Variant (which I'll come to next) for this game.

• This game is Public Press Only. That means that any messages anyone sends are received by everyone, which slows the game down a fair amount because players have to position themselves to make completely uncounterable moves if they want to coordinate them with allies, or they have to risk their allies misunderstanding what they are doing and not supporting them correctly.

• Nobody wants to lose or draw. Sounds trivial, right? Everyone wants to win any game they're playing. This one is different, though - every other game in the world cup has finished, so everyone in the game knows how many points all teams have. Every team in this game can still win the overall tournament, but for most of them it is only if they achieve a solo victory. One specific team will win if all players draw, so nobody except that team want this game to end in a draw, and certainly nobody wants anyone else to get a solo.

That said, fatigue is starting to set in and they may draw the game soon just to be done of it. That's only after over 3 years of trying to achieve a solo though.

Do you have a handy graph of how the SC counts of each player have changed throughout the game?

What a coincidence! I just happen to have one right here!

That game is really long. I want to just see the interesting bits.

Again, you're in luck! I happen to have an imgur album here which shows the high points and low points of each great power and explains a little what happened to them. The important provinces (Supply Centers) are marked by white circles with a black dot in them. The provinces and units belonging to each country have an assigned colour as follows:

• Pink, England
• Blue, France
• Brown, Germany
• Green, Italy
• Red, Austria
• Purple, Russia
• Yellow, Turkey

If you do want to look through the game for yourself, you can find the full record here. On webDiplomacy, red arrows represent move orders, yellow arrows represent support move orders, green lines represent support hold orders, and blue lines represent convoys.

Has any Supply Center never changed hands?

No. Every Supply Center on the board has changed hands at least once. Ankara has been taken the least, it's been held by Russia for the 76 years since he took it from its original owner, Turkey, in 1925. Rumania has been taken the most, it's been conquered an astonishing 26 times. Most SCs have been taken around 11 times, but in particularly contested places (like the Balkans and Scandinavia) the average is much higher.

If it's Public Press Only, can I read the messages the players have sent?

Yes! You can find all messages sent in the game here. Use the blue arrows above the messagebox to navigate pages. The chat from each country follows the same colour coding as their provinces and units.

Bear in mind, though, that there are so many messages to look through that they actually crashed the game at one point. The site administrators had to assign more memory to the chat of this particular game to fix it. There's also some profanity in some of the messages, although not many.

Diplomacy sounds interesting. Can I try it?

First off, playing the game in person is a very different experience to playing it online, and one that I find to be much more tense and exciting (although online is good too!). I'd very much recommend you play it in person first. You'll need a copy of the board game (it's available on Amazon) and 6 friends with 4 hours spare.

Obviously that can be a bit difficult to arrange, so you could also look for Diplomacy Face to Face groups in your area - there are quite a few of them around the world. If you want information about them feel free to PM me and I'll try to find out if there are any in your area and get back to you. Also, if you're part of a board gaming group, it's possible that someone there will have a copy so you might be able to play it with them.

If you are interested in the online version, there are many online sites that offer it. I'd recommend webDiplomacy but there are plenty of others if you don't like the interface there.

Is there anything I should know before I play?

Yes, specifically if you're playing in person. I'll let some board game celebrities say it for me:

"This game makes people mad, and I mean really mad." ... "The tagline is 'Diplomacy - Destroying friendships since 1965'." - Tom Vasel

"Diplomacy wounds run deep, and take forever to heal." - Wil Wheaton

It's not quite as bad as they make out, but it's worth making sure that you don't play it with someone you know will take lies and backstabbing badly. Also - don't play it over several sessions, the paranoia you get when you see other players talking to one another in the breaks can be unbearable.

Congratulations if you've read this far, and I hope others found this Diplomacy game to be as incredible as I did!

Hello ladies and gentlegamers, welcome to a new kind of weekly thread. Unlike more reputable threads around here which get their games from places like Steam and the Nintendo e-shop we are here to explore the some thing much more raw made by deranged indie developers running on too little sleep. That’s right we are here to talk about video games that come from game jams

Whats a game jam you may ask. Well imagine if you locked a group of game developers in a box for box for some quantity of time ranging from a few days to a few week and told them to compete with each other by building something around a theme and then judging whatever each other came up with, that's a game jam. Its voluntary crunch time and people are crazy enough to actually sign up for these things for some reason. There are more games submitted for various game jams than anyone could ever play and that is where I come in.

I select a double feature of two games each week on Saturday. I make no assurances related to quality or sanity. If you have issues with these picks leave a comment I will try and accommodate your feedback next week. Now without further ado, welcome one and all to the Saturday Game Jam thread(Its still Saturday somewhere in the world right?)

Anger Foot

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux
Genres: Shooter, Action

Do you dream of battling a sewer dwelling cabal of lizard people, are you mad that Gunpoint only let you have the gatecrasher upgrade on the last level, do you like hurting other people?

Anger Foot is a Hotline Miami inspired first people shooter born from the 7day fps game jam. Its got a thumping hardbass soundtrack and nonstop action to keep your blood pumping. Its since moved on to greener pastures and has a stated release on Steam in 2024 so if you like the prototype make sure to wish list the game on Steam.

Interminal

Platforms: Windows, macOS
Genres: Walking Sim

After gunning people down why not stop and smell the roses or perfumes as the case may be. Interminal is a short experimental game also coming the 7day fps game jam about wandering around an infinite airport smelling various perfumes, watching the planes take off, and contemplating life. Its a shame that everyone here lacks the hardware to actually let you smell the perfumes but you guys are an imaginative bunch so I trust you. Let me know what your favorite perfume is in the comments.

That’s all for now. In true Tildes fashion I wanted to start slow and maybe grow later. Again leave feedback in the comments if you feel an improvement can be made

NEXT WEEK

My friends and I have been striving for the perfect score of 13 in Just One, and there's almost always one or two cards which make it seemingly impossible unless you're very lucky.

Just One if you're unfamiliar, is a game where your teammate wants to guess a word -- and you each independently give a one-word clue, "Donkey", "Dreamworks", "Ogre". If two or more players write the same word, all those clues get hidden -- so your clues can't be too obvious.

The words vary absurdly in difficulty from words like "Wine" and "Snake" where you can basically break the game by listing wines and snakes -- to words like "Mexico" and "Strawberry" where you can come at them from a few directions. ...But about 10% of the words are things like "Grotto", "Couscous" and "Ramses" where honestly, you could possibly sit down with someone for 30 minutes describing them in excruciating detail, and they might still not come up with those particular words. Could you describe "Couscous" to your 10-year-old nephew who lives on Chick-fil-A and Mcdonalds? Could you disambiguate a "Grotto" from a cave, cavern, bunker or lair? Sometimes it's a vocabulary thing but more often, it's just words with a lot of synonyms.

I call these "land mine" cards and I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this phenomenon. Have any of you gotten a perfect score in Just One? If so did you randomly dodge these land mines or did you overcome them with a really perfect clue?

I'm getting on a 5 hour flight later today. I've got my Android phone (S22 Ultra) and cheap Android tablet (Lenovo P11 G2) with me. What are some of your favourite games you'd recommend to pass the time?

Because I'll be on a plane they'll have to playable without an internet connection. I also don't have any controllers with me, so would prefer games with decent touch controls. I'm open to any genre, but I particularly like RPGs. Thank you in advance!

I like to play games. So I guess I'm a "gamer"? But: I'm not into arena shooters, MMORPMRPORG grinders, anything with endless cutscenes of exposition and absolutely nothing that needs a "pass" to play... so where's my games? I feel like there's nothing for casual-but-not-candy-crush-or-clash-of-clans players like me out there.

I want something that takes me back to the days of Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sim City 2000 or more recently, Stardew that's not going to make my blood boil or nickel-and-dime me to progress. That doesn't mean it needs to be cute or easy, but more... meditative? Or goofy?

Given the crowd here I figured you lot would probably have some good recommendations. So: fire away!