Here's a first world problem: I work remote and sometimes I get bored during meetings. Wondering if you guys had any game recommendations for games I can play on a second monitor or something while I kill boredom in my meetings. Mouse only is probably the biggest requirement, and also something more "turn based" so if I need to I can still pay attention to the parts that I need to.

Some of my recommendations:
Slay the Spire (+ Downfall) - I "beat" all of it (A20H for all characters) so I wanted to take a break, but I loved it.
Monster Train - I didn't get into it as much as StS tbh, it's fineeee but not my personal favorite
Super Auto Pets - I'm not really an Autobattler kinda guy but the slow pace and the rotating sets make this game kinda perfect for what I'm looking for!
Brotato - I've been playing mouse only, but can't really stop it in the middle of an intense run tbh.

Steam or Android games if possible!

I remembered that thread asking about the update to Cyberpunk 2077, and figured after finishing the expansion I'd offer what I've got. I played the game once on release prior to playing now.

The tl;dr - its a hell of a lot better, can totally recommend it, expansion was cool and fun

The long:

First, regarding the update. It's excellent. The game does feel significantly better to play, because a whole lot less is bugging the hell out. You do occasionally come across some silliness, like four of the same car all at an intersection, or the same child populating a cafeteria. But these moments are far, far less frequent, I think I can count on one hand after 50 hours, the number of times stuff like that happened.

Wanted system is functional now. It just works the way you'd expect, and it is pretty easy to escape. More lawless parts of town are appropriately easier to get away with shit in. Driving feels better but still feels weird to me, like everything is slippery/wheels never have good traction.

The skills/perks/inventory stuff is a thousand times better. It has a few weird things here and there but is easier to follow and use. It's nice not having to really mess around with clothes and just look however I want. Combat is a lot more fun now that stuff behaves appropriately. That's really the theme of it, they did fix what needed fixing, and what we're left with much more closely aligns with folks' original expectations.

Quests wrap up and sometimes into one another in ways which are genuinely very impressive, and I encountered all of one that had an issue with it. I pretty much constantly went from quest to quest and found there was enough variety that I didn't really care about wandering much. I still did, and that is all much improved too. Npcs behave a lot better and look nicer, and jobs consistently finish up the way they're supposed to.

I specialized in blades, pistols, and shotguns, and played on Normal, mostly on my steam deck. I mostly raised Reflexes, Technical Ability, and Cool. I got to turn into a Dragonball ninja assassin, occasionally dualing Japanese cyborg women with katanas in the street. I'd get into shit because melee is genuinely pretty fun to mess with.

The visuals are awesome even on the handheld, the preset for the deck is higher than I expected. Performance was consistently good, on the deck as well as my PC. PC can go maximum and is using a 144hz display, it looks really really good with everything pushed.

The expansion:

It fits squarely within the best of what the game offers. The storyline is complex and goes into the rest of the world in an impressive way, it's like it's always been there. The characters are exceptionally well done, as is the voice acting. The whole thing felt like a great season of a good show, it kinda proceeds like that too.

Dogtown is a really cool area. The detail is wild and sense of place really some of the strongest in the game. I felt uneasy at night in the rain, that's always cool for a game to evoke. It feels both like it's own independent spot and like a part of the city, they really nailed it with how it looks and what's available there.

Conclusion:

The complete package I'd say is totally worth it. Compared to release it is a completely different game. Feels like a much more realized vision, that consistently hits some pretty high notes. Panam is still the coolest, but Songbird was a really well done character too. With the game not being a flaming wreck, it's way easier to get into the storytelling, and it is pretty great for this medium. Especially those major characters, they're interestingly complicated and don't always behave how you'd expect. The overall experience is kinda like being a protagonist in a tv show, quests have their own arcs and climaxes and characters appear distinctly changed by the events as they unfold. That was always there, but now I'm comfortable saying you'll actually have that experience playing it.

The new Forza Motorsport has released to the masses as of today, and has been available to those who paid extra for premium upgrades and the like for about a week. I got it via Xbox Gamepass and played about an hour of it this morning, and so far it feels like a nice return to form for the series, which hasn't seen a new non-Horizon edition since Forza Motorsport 7 in 2017.

That game had some baggage with the card system/gambling mechanics, and I'm glad to see none of that thus far in the new Forza Motorsport - which, you may have noticed, has dropped the number. There's a feeling that Microsoft/Turn 10 may be aiming to make this something of a long-term platform play rather than just another game in the series.

I'm enjoying it so far, and after playing Forza Horizon 4 and 5 a lot since FM7 came out, I'm glad to have the return to more traditional circuit racing, and absolutely do not miss the supremely annoying voiced characters from those games.

The thing I most immediately noticed upon playing the game (besides the graphics, which are a real showcase for the Xbox Series X or a sufficiently beefy PC) is the new upgrade/tuning system, which requires you to actually spend time driving a specific car in order to unlock the various upgrade parts for it. You earn car points for doing things like clean racing and fast lap times, which you can then spend on upgrade parts between races. The game keeps calling those CP, which makes me think that nobody at Turn 10 has spent any time on the internet. An unfortunate acronym...

I'm curious to know what everyone's opinion on this game is. I know a lot of the audience is turned off by the more sim-like/boring nature of the Forza Motorsport games versus the arcade fantasy for the Horizon games, but I'm very much on the FM side of that divide.

Cities: Skylines II is an upcoming city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. It is a sequel to Cities: Skylines, and expands upon many of the simulation factors such as simulated city and population sizes, and improved traffic AI and management schemes. The game is scheduled for release on 24 October 2023 for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.

Source: Wikipedia

As we near the release date of Cities: Skylines II, more and more media and articles both substantial and fluff-esque are going to be popping up everywhere. Inspired by the release of Two Dollars Twenty's YouTube gameplay video (linked below), this thread is a repository for any morsel of news regarding the much anticipated city-building sequel. Utilise the tags to see previously posted content on Tildes.

Tildetablers,

What board games, card games and whatnot have you been playing this week? Don't be shy, share those sessions!

For me it was a single game of Western Legends with expansions. I've played this game, sans expansions, a couple of times and have never really been blown way, but the expansion certainly helped and I enjoyed it a whole lot more.

The game sets you as a character in the wild west. It's a bit of a sandbox game: there are a bunch of things you can do and you have freedom moving around and doing them. You can hustle cattle, play poker, buy upgrades, prospect for gold, fight, steal, &c. You basically earn points by doing each of these things and working your way up various tracks to earn legendary points which are victory points.

The expansions added a whole frontier area to explore and added story cards, which are basically thematic events that give you goals to claim. I feel like extra board and story cards really improved the experience and immersion and it was much more enjoyable this time around. We also played two characters each, which may also have helped, as this made it possible to explore different strategies at the same time.

I'm still not massively impressed with the game, but I don't think I'll disappointed if it's suggested now. If I were forced to rate it I'd probably give it a 1.8/π.

So, everyone, what have you played this week? What did you think? What are you hoping to play next?

Hello all and welcome to the weekend! We made it. Or if your weekend doesn't begin until later, you'll make it yet!

Let's talk cozy games! You know the ones I'm talking about, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon. Games we used to call something else before the collective zeitgeist of the Internet decided to lump them all together under (which I'm personally fine with, I mean what do you call Animal Crossing anyway?)

In a stark contrast to my younger and more vulnerable years, I've become much more of "casual" gamer, and I find myself enjoying shorter bouts of play rather than becoming engrossed in the same world or story for hours on end. Games like Animal Crossing are perfect for this, in that I can just pick it up, talk to some villagers and go fishing or whatever, and put it down whenever I please. Not just that though, but I just absolutely love the warm and well, cozy vibe games like these offer. I've best heard them described as a warm mug of tea by a window as it rains outside.

Enough about me, let's talk about you! What "cozy" games do you enjoy? Feel free to lump them all together, who cares, it doesn't matter! We are all cozy games on this day.

11PM - Animal Crossing: Wild World

What game mechanic, boss or puzzle in a game got you to give up?

For me it was a drivers license test in Gran Tourismo 2 on the Playstation. I was so into racing sims that I had a decent steering wheel and pedals set (like $80 in 1999). I even found a better coffee table to more comfortably fit it all. I had so many hours into GT1, various NASCAR entries, MOTO Racer, various Need For Speed games, etc.

GT2 had a system where you had to upgrade your license to unlock more tracks. There was one where you had like 15 or 20 seconds to slolem through a course and then do it in reverse. After hours almost every night for a month straight of getting to within .5 seconds of qualifying for the license to unlock more tracks I just couldn't anymore. I gave up racing/car sims for nearly 15 years until XBox heavily pushed Forza Horizon and I gave it a try.

It certainly didn't help that I had just recently been scarred from being stuck in a similar system in X-Wing vs TIE. There was a training mission where you had to take your X-Wing through a course with barrel rolls before you unlocked something (another ship or more dangerous missions?) that I was stuck on. After like 6 weeks of getting within a second or less to completion I finally found a cheatcode to bypass it. By then the damage to my enjoyment of the game had been done and I never did finish that game.

There's a popular trend on Reddit at the moment that they're struggling to engage with. The idea is that someone will post the question

"Ask me anything about my world"

And this does two things. It gives them an opportunity to show off their setting, and more importantly it gives them a prompt. Someone may ask a question you don't have an answer to, so you're supposed to come up with one. Doing this enough will help you flesh out your world in ways you may not have considered on your own.

I think the reason this is failing on Reddit is because there are a dozen people jumping on the bandwagon and filling the RPG subs with spam, which is causing other members to lash out at them out of fatigue.

I think we here on Tildes could probably handle it a little better, and it would be better served as a single thread. Top level comments are for asking questions, and then anyone is welcome to reply to those with their answers. By sharing the same pool of questions this will allow us to compare and contrast our worlds with our friends here and maybe help spur on the creative juices.

October's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Completely ignoring gameplay, which game do you think has the most amazing graphics? Which game do you look at and it makes you question how far technology has come? Or maybe which game has such effective art direction it completely sucks you in?

For me, it's Horizon Forbidden West. I just went back to the DLC after taking a break from it. I forgot just how good it looks! I swear it looks like every grain of sand is modeled, and the character models are insane.

Now the topic may be inflammatory, so let me walk it back and say "in some cases" - let me explain;

Just got me this gamepad and I absolutely adore it - for folks not wanting to click on a link, think of it as a fancy SNES pad.

I got it as a fightpad and for that it is marvelous - and while I have no intentions of playing a 3d action game with it, I booted up some 2d indies and platformers to take it for a spin ... and realized that apparently, 6 buttons + dpad just aren't enough anymore.

Since when do you need to have a light and hard attack as separate buttons? And need an analogue stick on top of the dpad to navigate through inventory? The amount of "simple" games needing to use all the buttons on the modern controller - without a viable alternative - is ridiculous.

Yes, there are some workarounds but just wanted to vent.

I'm installing some random titles from my backlog (I have 800+ on my backlog through bundle deals, giveaways, etc.) and it's a crapshoot, not in my favor.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

Edit: Yes I realize the modern controller is standardized to the "two sticks + pad + 4 face buttons + 4 shoulder buttons" design; what I'm saying is that while for some game that design is essential, a lot of other games use up all the buttons without a baked-in viable alternative, or worse yet, use buttons for the sake of using buttons!

So I recently tried to replay Prototype on PC, only to learn that it's essentially incompatible with modern hardware and crashes instantly past the main menu.

I've tried searching other posts on other sites and most people recommend super hero games and Infamous. Well, I don't have a PS, so Infamous is off the table, and super hero games really are not the same. Call me immature, but if I can't massacre civilians in my power fantasy game, it's not really like Prototype.

I've seen pretty much all the AAA games of past and present that get recommended, but I'm wondering if there are any Indie games that aren't at the forefront that I've missed.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links
• Each deal must include a short statement of why you think the game/games are worthwhile, or a question to the community about the game/games

If you don’t want to see threads like this, add deals or sale to your personal tag filters.

Server host: tildes.nore.gg
Dynmap: https://tildes.nore.gg

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

Server Changelog

• All registered players now have access to /co inspect. This command will allow you to see block changes from the last 14 days so that you can hopefully resolve land disputes without admin/moderator intervention.
• There is currently an alpha version of a treasure hunt script (source) running on the server. Once every few days you'll see a TREASURE HUNT! message in chat and a 10 minute race for an elytra or netherite loot begins.
• There is a page to see each player's time on the server in the last 30 days.
• I have disabled Phantoms entirely