1338's recent activity
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentI've only ever played V so interesting to read how playing it with the context of the past games changes things. I tried to play Online once but after sitting waiting for it to load for like 10...I've only ever played V so interesting to read how playing it with the context of the past games changes things.
I tried to play Online once but after sitting waiting for it to load for like 10 minutes I gave up and never looked back.
But with the rate of delays for VI, you might have time to play V a second time before VI actually comes out!
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 20... I took a Detour but it was very brief. I stopped because, like a real detour, it's just not very fun. The main game I played tonight is one I think was somewhat popular back in the day:...Day 20...
I took a Detour but it was very brief. I stopped because, like a real detour, it's just not very fun.
The main game I played tonight is one I think was somewhat popular back in the day: From Dust. It's a physics game where you play a black sphere that can pick up sand and fluids. You have to help your (mildly grossly stereotypical) primitive humans get to N statues before you unlock the final statue which leads to the next level. There's some odd bits around plants and animals showing up but the main puzzle is simply how to establish and secure a good land path between the statues for each level. And of course you have natural perils like volcanos, tsunamis, and floods adding some challenge as you go.
There's some annoyances. The Steam reviews mostly hate on the Ubisoft Connect, which I had no technical issues installing (and then immediately uninstalling after I finished playing). The game is old (and I think originally built for consoles) so some of the graphics and physics are really silly looking now as a result. The controls are a tad odd but the only annoying thing is how it forces your cameras into cut scenes just to show the location of the next statue to work towards. So many less obtrusive ways to do that.
Overall I find it enjoyable. Don't really get too much "fun" from it but it's fairly relaxing and that nice mix of spurts of thinking to plan and then fairly brainless execution. I got about halfway through the levels in an hour and a half, I imagine the second half takes longer but it's still quite a short game. Given I paid 3.74 for it I don't really have any complaints there. If I revisit it probably depends on how annoyed I end up feeling at needing to reinstall Ubisoft Connect.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 19... I bought this next game only 6 months ago for ~$25. Since then I made several attempts at playing it, but I would always get a pop-up saying it requires a controller. As I usually had a...Day 19...
I bought this next game only 6 months ago for ~$25. Since then I made several attempts at playing it, but I would always get a pop-up saying it requires a controller. As I usually had a cat on my lap by then, I kept moving onto other things and then forgetting by the next time. But I finally have my XBox One controller hooked up, so I gave Sea of Stars a shot.
The first thing I noticed is that the game doesn't seem to actually require a controller despite the pop-up at launch. It seems to only be needed if you're playing with local co-op, which I'm not. So oh well.
The game is a classic-JRPG style game for the most part. The plot and writing is pretty typical fantasy with plenty of cheese (e.g. "fleshmancer") but not bad. You play as these two star-childs with magic powers that mean only you can save the world and defeat the big bad. The prologue has you going to Hogwarts and then actual gameplay starts with your final exam. I got midway through that, just a little past the part where you get the third character unlocked.
The game looks really nice, moving around the map and doing the puzzley bits feels pretty good as the characters dash around quickly. It's all quite usable and the tutorial bits do a good job of showcasing the things about the game that are different. One thing I wasn't expecting is the "survival" pillar of the game where you can fish and forage for food and then cook healing items. I like it. The one thing I'm not a huge fan of is how they shove quicktime mechanics into the battle so you have to press the button at just the right animation frame for certain attacks/blocks. That's not my strong suit in general but I certainly understand it in an action-y game. In a strictly turn-based RPG it feels utterly bizarre and the animations really don't seem conducive for it. But despite that, it's a definite "revisit"
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 18... Some sad news. I've suffered a tragic loss of my Steam controller's USB dongle. It is survived by its big brother, the XBox One USB dongle. I've been eyeing one game on my unplayed list...Day 18...
Some sad news. I've suffered a tragic loss of my Steam controller's USB dongle. It is survived by its big brother, the XBox One USB dongle.
I've been eyeing one game on my unplayed list these past some weeks but always passed on it do to it requiring a controller. Now that I remembered to actually get a controller running, I gave it a try. I bought Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons during July 2016 for $1.49, incidentally in the same purchase as Stardew Valley, my 4th most played steam game.
Brothers is absolutely charming. You simultaneously play an older brother with your left hand and a younger brother with your right. You're living on the edge of a village in a fantasy world that makes excellent use of vertical space and your father suffers an accident. You need to go on a trip to get... medicine? a doctor? a magic potion? I don't really know what but you need to get something for him. One of the strange, but yet more charming, design decisions was to have voice acting but have the characters speak an Arabic flavor of Simlish (Simrabric?). It's a super linear puzzle adventure so dialogue really isn't needed but I did have to do a search in Steam discussions just to make sure there wasn't a language setting I missed.
The game has a few rough edges. Like I hit one strange bug where my character spontaneously teleported and fell to his death after I defeated a boss. And the controls can be a bit surprising with how the game avoids the brothers colliding with each other. There's some times when the game's age shows through but overall it has aged quite well. The visual design is good enough that the fact that the graphics are a decade+ old isn't something you even notice beyond the prologue.
The biggest challenge is getting the "split brain" coordination established and internalizing the "big brother = left, little brother = right." I spent quite a while having the brothers run away rather than running towards each other because I had my left/right swapped. But I've always enjoyed trying to do different things with left and right, like if I'm petting two animals at once I'll try to switch to patting with my left hand without it disturbing the stroking I'm doing with my right. So the challenge here has been enjoyable so far.
I had finished the section with the trolls (maybe orcs?) when I stopped. Have a feeling this game isn't super long and I definitely have an urge to put my "unplayed screening" on hold and spend a couple more days playing through the rest of it. Suffice it to say that, assuming I do resist, it's on the top of my revisit list. Maybe I'll try the remaster with better graphics.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentVery cheap indeed. It was/is normally $3 and after the sale discount I paid only 15 cents. Nothing to complain about there!Very cheap indeed. It was/is normally $3 and after the sale discount I paid only 15 cents. Nothing to complain about there!
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 (edited )Link ParentDay 17... Today was... a bit rough. I've recently been reading a horror book so when I stumbled on Neverending Nightmares I figured I'd give it a shot. Incidentally, I bought this game in the same...Day 17...
Today was... a bit rough.
I've recently been reading a horror book so when I stumbled on Neverending Nightmares I figured I'd give it a shot. Incidentally, I bought this game in the same purchase when I bought the Steam Controller in June 2015. I might actually plug that thing in soon as I have a few controller-only games in my unplayed list.
Neverending Nightmares is a 2D side scrolling game in mostly black and white line-drawing with color for just the things you interact with and blood. The game is full of shadowy black of course. The art style I think is the high point of the game. As you start walking around you complete a "level" by slowly meandering through a house and eventually stumbling on a psuedo-puzzle like finding a candle so you can go in a dark place. As you go you eventually get some stealth elements where you have to avoid hilarious looking monsters.
The horror elements weren't really working for me, it was put on so thick it rolled over to comedic and the jump scares were just annoying (I'm not a fan of those on the best of days). Without that it kinda just feels a bit dull given how slow you walk, how long the house can be, and how little stamina you have to run.
I got to the insane asylum level, which I think is roughly halfway through the game, before I just gave up. I think the highlight of that part of the game was the hilarious baby golemn monster with suspiciously asymmetrical arms.
Won't revisit.
With that being a bust I decided to try something else too. I went with Legend of Mysteria, or if you believe the game window, Murder of Mysteria.
This is an RPG Maker game that I bought as part of the Labyronia Bundle a little before Christmas 2016. Labyronia and Labyronia 2 are incidentally also on my unplayed list and I think will stay there for some more years at least.
The writing was bad. As in painfully bad. That's on top of the story being excessively cliche. The level and puzzle design was bad. Like the start of the game is full of locks you need to unlock, but you can't use the unlock lock spell on any of the locked locks despite the very first puzzle being to learn how to unlock the unlock lock spells. I think at some point in the game you're supposed to have combat but I didn't get there. The start of the game is just puzzles, level design, and story... and it didn't do any of it well. So I ran out of patience.
Also, uck RPG maker. The option menus are inscrutable and useless. I was unable to remap from arrow keys to WASD for movement, which made gameplay obnoxious as I don't have arrow keys on my keyboard. I also at one point hit F12 to screenshot some bad dialogue and instead of a screenshot the entire game reloaded. Again, probably an RPG Maker fault.
I think it's telling something like 8% of players got the "leave the first room" achievement. I don't see myself being part of the 4% who beat the game though.
After two disappointing games I still had a bit of time so figured I'd try one last thing. That ended up being Beep, an older game originally made in 2011. It's a physics-ey 2D platformer where you're a robot called a beep with a physics gun, a regular gun, and a jetpack. You jump around the mildly Seussian landscape, shoot robots, collect colorful dots, and go right until you hit the end. The art style, silly robots, the rocket ship level select screen, and the simplistic gameplay says to me this is clearly a game meant for children. Despite that, the steam page describes the game as "hardcore". I really didn't play enough to get to that point I guess. The game has literally no story, it's just a barebones platformer with a rather uninteresting gimmick. I'd play it if I was bored and had nothing else but there's so many more interesting games in my library.
I was done after the first couple levels.
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Comment on If you could travel back in time and bring one thing back to the modern day, what would it be? in ~talk
1338 Link ParentWell my prank would still happen somewhere then, they'd just never find out it was a prank and I imagine blame it all on ancient aliens.Well my prank would still happen somewhere then, they'd just never find out it was a prank and I imagine blame it all on ancient aliens.
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Comment on If you could travel back in time and bring one thing back to the modern day, what would it be? in ~talk
1338 Link ParentAnd I'd be on that alternate timeline when I go forward, no? Otherwise you'd have the duplication paradoxes.And I'd be on that alternate timeline when I go forward, no? Otherwise you'd have the duplication paradoxes.
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Comment on If you could travel back in time and bring one thing back to the modern day, what would it be? in ~talk
1338 LinkI would dress in as many layers of fully synthetic polyester clothing as I can. Then I would go back to King Tut's tomb a few days after it was sealed. I would spread the clothing around the tomb...I would dress in as many layers of fully synthetic polyester clothing as I can. Then I would go back to King Tut's tomb a few days after it was sealed. I would spread the clothing around the tomb so hopefully at least some shreds will be well enough preserved. Then I'd consider bringing back King Tut's corpse as surely a fresh mummy would be immensely informative. But that might be going too far so I'd probably just pick some trinket that doesn't look too historically significant to bring back with me to prove what happened. Polyester was invented decades after King Tut's tomb was first discovered so it'd really mindfuck everyone for a solid century.
Alternatively, I'd go back to Pompeii on the day of the eruption and rescue the watchdog of Vesonius Primus.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 16... I stuck with my recent theme and played yet another deck builder; this is probably the last. A couple months ago in I wanted to buy Dredge (which I loved). Since it wasn't much more and...Day 16...
I stuck with my recent theme and played yet another deck builder; this is probably the last.
A couple months ago in I wanted to buy Dredge (which I loved). Since it wasn't much more and I'd heard good things, I bought the "Dredge x Inscryption x Animal Well" combo. Inscryption was the one I'd heard of the least and so I put off playing it until now.
Inscryption feels like the inverse of Gilgamech. It's creative and tries hard, it has a lot of focus on visual design and very distinct gameplay. But it's a bit rougher and (by design) harder to learn. I played/died twice, once to the first boss and then to the second boss. I got the safe and subsequent cupboard open and unlocked the wolf. I spent way too much time trying and failing to brute-force the clock.
I'm not huge for the roguelike game cycle of fail and try try try try try try try try try try try try try try try try try try try try again (I have 60ish hours in slay the spire so not like I hate it but I'm definitely not playing enough to be good at it). But I will admit the "custom card" mechanic and the way it introduces new things each time is pretty engaging. The second time I lucked out with a really strong no-cost card and found myself wanting to play another fight just to try out that card. The meta-puzzle game is well done with the talking cards and gives you enough to interact with to know where things are going but it's clear you need to keep try try try trying again to know the direction to go (or you could probably cheat I guess).
The style/theme of the cards is interesting and the overall gameplay makes it feel more puzzle than a typical combat game. But it's still so heavily RNG based that your luck only gets you so far, definitely more Slay The Spire-ish in that regard than either of the previous two.
Not sure whether I'll revisit. I could see this being a good mobile-style game where you play a bit while on the bus or whatever. But to sit down and play it, I'm not sure.
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Comment on What are you reading these days? in ~books
1338 LinkI finally finished the "Storygraph Reads The World" challenge with The Storm (meh) and decided to replace it with the Lemmy Books Bingo challenge (also helpfully on storygraph), so next couple...I finally finished the "Storygraph Reads The World" challenge with The Storm (meh) and decided to replace it with the Lemmy Books Bingo challenge (also helpfully on storygraph), so next couple dozen books I read will be things to fullfill that challenge.
I've been fairly lucky, since the last one of these threads I've read some books I really liked and I think as a result I've been reading a lot more than I normally do.
I bought a few books from 2024's Most Banned Books list. One of them was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. That was a tough read, the chapter about the father hits hard at the end. Each chapter is something worth its own conversation really, the one with the cat especially stands out. And another banned book I just finished reading today is All Boys Aren't Blue by George Matthew Johnson. The order I read these two books was more fitting than I realized as the "Blue" in both titles is related. It was an interesting book, full of things I can understand but never relate to. In the afterword he talks about how he wrote this memoir at 33 which, as someone at a similar age, I cannot imagine doing. I can certainly understand (don't agree with but understand) why both books are frequently banned by schools.
The book that really ripped out my heart recently was The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Even though it was quite obvious where things were going by the second chapter, I still found myself actually crying at the end. The fact that I read it with a cat on my lap (a much less good cat though) might have helped. But it was just a wonderful, emotional book. It's a bit weird because I read Deplorable Conversations With Cats And Other Distractions only about a month ago, which has a lot more in common with Travelling Cat Chronicles than I realized until after I finished it.
Another unexpected enjoyable read was Keyhole Factory for its creativity.
And I read Songbirds And Snakes, which I enjoyed enough to order the other 4 hunger games books.I just started reading Hitchhiker's Guide. I feel like I've seen at least a million renditions of this book on TV/Movies but I don't think I've ever read it.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 15... I decided to go with another deck-builder today: Griftlands. I bought this about a year before Gilgamech (from yesterday) in summer 2023. The two games are an interesting contrast with...Day 15...
I decided to go with another deck-builder today: Griftlands. I bought this about a year before Gilgamech (from yesterday) in summer 2023. The two games are an interesting contrast with each other, Griftland is, in about every way, bigger. Griftland has not just one type of combat but two (traditional fighting and "negotiation"), it has relationships with NPCs, it has a somewhat more interesting story, it has more complicated combat rules, it has much more complicated cards, it has temporarily recruitable allies, it has more game modes, it even has a more complicated options menu.
But at the same time it lacks the charm of Gilgamech and that complexity means less accessibility to newcomers. The combat game mode is straightforward enough but the negotiation mode is just weird. The way they just had to pick random words that fit the theme of negotiation to replace e.g. defense makes it harder to keep track of and the scheme of "arguments" being active and being attacked is strange. You just have to ignore the metaphor and remember what the things actually do. But I'm sure after several hours you'd get used to that.
Didn't hit any problems with the game, it ran smoothly.
I'll probably revisit but I think it'll wait until after I revisit and tire of Gilgamech and then until I feel enough hankering for a deck builder to actually commit to it for a while. I think it'll take some commitment to fully get my head around the mechanics.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
1338 LinkDay 14... Something like 3/4 of my backlog is things I bought before 2014. I've been feeling like I'm just criticizing old games for being old so for today I made sure to play something more...Day 14...
Something like 3/4 of my backlog is things I bought before 2014. I've been feeling like I'm just criticizing old games for being old so for today I made sure to play something more recent. Last summer (at the same time I bought the Rat games) I bought the complete SteamWorld collection. The thing I love about SteamWorld games is that they are a reliably solid rendition of well established mechanics. They're never a revolutionary new idea but when it's a type of game you like, you'll probably like (but not love) SteamWorld's version. I've played all the rest of them already, the only one I hadn't yet gotten around to before today is SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech.
Gilgamech is one of those a deck builder/rpg-ish card fighter games similar to (among many others) Slay The Spire but linear instead of roguelike. I got through the first couple chapters. Like always, good graphics, non-distracting audio, usable UI, forgettable story, unoffensive but not-especially-funny humor, and well-polished gameplay.
You play three characters and can have 8 cards per character for a total deck of 24 cards. Part of me feels like it's a bit small but it feels like the game is pushing for "synergies" between characters rather than complicated strategies within one character. I selected "normal" difficulty and so far it feels well-balanced there to give difficulty but still be winnable for a typical player. The first boss I barely beat with only a couple of rounds left that I could survive. By the second boss I had gotten enough healing/buffering cards that I could have nearly kept the fight going indefinitely so that one was easier. I like the little hidden areas, they're noticeable if you look but not to the point where they stand out. I am curious how well the balancing works out longer term and whether it gets a bit monotonous over time.
Will definitely revisit.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentI do like Bob, now that the annoyance is worn down I feel more inclined to try it again. Rebuilding only started to bother me after getting stuck and needing to restart the same level multiple...I do like Bob, now that the annoyance is worn down I feel more inclined to try it again.
Rebuilding only started to bother me after getting stuck and needing to restart the same level multiple times. And it was a level where you need to build long arms and counterbalance. I suppose I could have saved/restored the design, but at the time I first built it I wasn't expecting to need to restart it.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 13... Today was a game from an IndieGala bundle I got in March 2012: "Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes" though the most grotesque part is certainly the camera. This game is more-or-less an indie...Day 13...
Today was a game from an IndieGala bundle I got in March 2012: "Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes" though the most grotesque part is certainly the camera. This game is more-or-less an indie cRPG made by people who like both western and Japanese RPGs. There's a core there that feels like it could have been good. The combat is fairly simplified and has a slightly more actiony feel in the combat controls while still being very much turn-based. It is from 2010 and I'm torn on whether it did not age well or whether it was always this rough.
Overall, not going to revisit and don't think I would have cared for it even if I had played it when I first got it.
The Old:
When you launch the game you get one of those old-school launcher and config tools. Except this one is now utterly and totally FUBAR. It seems they decided to run it as a webpage and, I'm not sure if the built-in renderer is way behind the webpage or it's a matter of modern Window's security changes or what, but you get dozens of javascript execution errors you have to click through before you can launch the game. You could forgive that for just being such an old game if not for the fact that the game is still for sale on Steam.
I guess this game was before widescreen monitors became popular because when I played it most of the UI was horizontally distorted as if they designed it to look right on 4:3 and then set width to 100%. This game is quite dialogue heavy and the main UI element affected by this is the dialogue box along the bottom of the screen, making it really painful to read.
The bad
The game aspires to parody but it fell flat for me and instead felt like an earnest reproduction of the worst tropes. The attempts at humor just did not work for me and I highly doubt that gets better even if I were to play it all the way through.
The evil
Once you get past the poor ageing, the really painful part of this game is the controls and camera. It's hard to explain exactly why without experiencing it, but it feels like they tried too many things without spending nearly enough time testing that it feels right. For an indie cRPG like this they should just have click controls, not tried to support click controls and WASD and a grid system and a freeform camera and smoothed auto-camera w/ framing offsets. The net effect of these elements, as well as the lack of clear transition between battle and non-battle, feels disorienting.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 12... When I wonder how my Steam library got so huge, I only need to look back on days like Jul 22nd, 2012 when I bought 42 games in one transaction for a total of $65. One of those games was...Day 12...
When I wonder how my Steam library got so huge, I only need to look back on days like Jul 22nd, 2012 when I bought 42 games in one transaction for a total of $65. One of those games was Bob Came In Pieces, which I finally played.
Bob Came in Pieces is a physics game where you control a little space craft and fly it through various puzzley obstacles to get through a level. You can make tweaks to your spaceship and attach various structural elements and move where thrusters and other attachments are positioned. So while you start with just up, left, and right movement you can later have thrusters going down or up-left or have poking sticks and suction cups. It's a pretty good game, it reminds me of a flash game with a similar control scheme but the spaceship in that was super fragile and the aim of the game was to be super ginger. This game is quite the opposite; the spaceship is immune to damage and you sometimes have to recklessly fling the ship at that things to solve puzzles.
It aged pretty well graphically and even scales up to my screen's full 4k resolution. Only weirdness I hit is that you need to hit alt-enter to go fullscreen as the toggle on the option screen is broken.
The game can get a bit frustrating though. You frequently have to rebuild the ship to get past one roadblock and then immediately rebuild it again 2 seconds later. It'd be better if one build could be used for a few puzzles in a row. And what really got me was how easy it is for your ship to become stuck in place with no recourse but restarting the level. It'd be much better if you could self-destruct and go back to the last build pad instead of the start of the level. But as it is, you have to go back and redo like 3 puzzles you've already figured out because you actually got jammed against a rock just wrong. And since it's a physics game with intentionally finnicky controls, it's not like solving it once makes it that much easier to do a second time.
It's a maybe if I'll play more. It's a game I think I would have liked more had I played it like 15 years ago when it was made but I could see myself getting in a mood for it.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 11... I decided to launch up Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic after seeing @kaffo talk about it in the "What games have you been playing" thread. I bought this just under a year ago in...Day 11...
I decided to launch up Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic after seeing @kaffo talk about it in the "What games have you been playing" thread.
I bought this just under a year ago in June so it's one of the more recent games I've done so far this burner. It's a USSR themed city builder so of course very similar to Skylines and other Sim city themed builders. I mostly just played through the first several parts of the campaign tutorial so my city amounts to several dreary looking apartment buildings, some shops, sports fields, and a farm. Overall this seems like a pretty good builder. The most frustrating thing is it seems impossible to build on a grid unless there's some option or keyboard shortcut I missed. That makes some sense when you consider it puts less emphasis on things being car-centric and snapping to roads. Instead rails, roads, walkways, are all equally first class citizens and the simcity style zoning is replaced by manually plopping every single building. That gives you a lot more control for good and bad.
There's clearly a lot I couldn't get to touching in just an hour or two. I'd like to spend more time playing it properly but the UI has a lot of small elements. I was squinting the whole time playing it on my TV even with the UI elements scaled to max size. When I was playing BG3 I hit this issue and had to rely on steam's remote play to stream from my desktop in the living room to my laptop at my desk. But I don't know if I like this game enough to jump through those hoops so it might go back on the backlog.
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Comment on May 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
1338 Link ParentDay 10... Today was a bit scattered. I started out playing Revenge of the Titans. It's a 2D tower defense game I got Aug 9, 2011, probably through Humble Bundle. It has a plentiful upgrade menu...Day 10...
Today was a bit scattered. I started out playing Revenge of the Titans. It's a 2D tower defense game I got Aug 9, 2011, probably through Humble Bundle. It has a plentiful upgrade menu and a few game modes as well as a rather unique UI. It plays like a fairly generic tower defense game, at least the little bit I played. Each round in campaign mode is quite fast and you start over each round rather than building up on the same map for several rounds. I don't really have much problem with it but I just honestly wasn't feeling it.
I tried playing Ricochet, which I feel like I have in fact played before but it might have been before Steam started tracking play time. Ricochet is of course one of Valve's earliest games, dating back to 2000. I got Ricochet through the Counter-Strike 1 Anthology, which was my second ever purchase on steam (my first was Audiosurf and my 0th purchase was the Orange Box, which I bought in person at a Gamestop (or maybe it was still EB) but of course introduced me to Steam). Anyways, nobody else was online so I couldn't really play. I jumped around for a bit by myself and looked up how to add bots but couldn't be arsed.
Finally I switched over to Puzzler World 2. I purchased this and Puzzle World 1 on Nov 23, 2011 and I put a whole 0.1 hours into the first one previously. Despite the name, this game is less puzzles and more an interactive off-brand activity book. It has word search, crosswords, color the picture, miniature sudoku, and some weirder ones I didn't really understand as the instructions were quite poor. It was apparently originally built for DS and ported to PC, which explains the weird quasi-touch interface. The game was made by a British company, which I discovered due to some difficult crossword hints like the one about a British sex toy retailer I had never heard of before (Ann Summers). When you beat a "puzzle" you then "get to" do a time-limited actual puzzle like solving a word jumble. If you beat that then you get to spin a wheel and earn "hint tokens" to use for hints. I got through several puzzles, the only one I enjoyed was one where you connect two same-value numbers in grid with a path whose length is that same value. So two 3s get connected by a line of length 3. The numbers have a color associated and in the end it paints a picture. It's the only one that felt both puzzly and proper (unlike the 6x6 sudoku).
Don't see myself revisiting any of these.
Day 21...
I had another 3 game day
The first one I tried is one that's quite famous and formerly popular: The Binding of Isaac. I only ended up playing one "round" because quite simply this isn't my type of game. I don't care for the twin-shooter format nor roguelike so the combination isn't my thing.
I then launched up a game that seems to have been taken down from Steam: Shoot Many Robots. It's a side-scrolling shooter where you... shoot many robots. Kinda reminded me of Borderlands for reasons I can't entirely pinpoint. It's enjoyable in a guilty pleasure sort of way. You go level to level shooting robots of various sizes and occasionally punching bullets out of the air. As you go you buy better guns and cosmetics. And that's really about all there is to this game. The art style is fitting for the game and good but not great quality-wise. It has aged decently well thanks to its arcade-y nature. I only got through a few levels before I had to stop because some of the sound effects were freaking out my dog.
I spent most of my time on a more recent game and purchase: Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator. I bought it a few months ago but never got around to launching it before now. On one level it's literally just yet another "job simulators" but on the other it's quite unique. The art style is the most obvious manifestation of that with the entire game looking like it's drawn on old parchment. The core gameplay is similarly cliche at a surface level: you grow ingredients, craft potions, then sell them to customers; but the way it does that is a bit different. The crafting uses a system where you're on a map and each ingredient forms a path-segment (usually in a sinusoidal course) that you have to use to get to one of the finite types of potion. The challenge comes in creating a path that gives you a high grade potion with the least ingredient cost. Selling involves a bartering minigame. And there's a handful of other mechanics that you'd probably expect (leveling, advanced recipes, an overall "goal list", merchants, unlockable advanced ingredient growing). I was shocked to realize how much time I had spent on it when it came time to stop, I could easily see myself spending a good number of hours on this.