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Fallout London. I've been busy so I don't have a lot of play in but it's one HECK of a mod!!

Yes, there is a HUGE issue with crashing but adding the Buffout4 fix seems to have resolved that issue.

While it's unquestionably a Fallout game it's just plain fun to explore a different region and the devs seem to have paid good attention to local locations. For example, I got stuck on one quest and Googled the name of the in game pub I was working out of and, sure as heck, it was a real location south of London.

Most of the mechanics are the same as Fallout but pretty much everything has been reskinned and renamed. At least at the beginning of the game you pretty much are forced into a melee build as guns and ammo are nowhere near as common as in Fallout. The enemies will also kick your ass so I've had to change my normal play style, at least for now.

If anyone is interested in playing I HIGHLY recommend going through GOG and just buying a fresh version of FO4GOTY because trying to downgrade an existing version is a PITA and you can't plug the mod in over anything other than a pre-update FO4 file. Besides, GOG has the FO4 edition you need for less than $20 so it's a pretty small investment for a HUGE freebie on the London mod.

This is NOT just a DLC. It's a whole new game and you can't move from FO4 to London so it's one or the other.

Still playing alot of 7 Days To Die. One of the things I like is the storytelling in the POIs. It has a real Fallout feel to it, but without the computer terminal messages to tell the story. An example is a residence I was sent to clear out. Big mansion in the country, and when you go in, you see that they had it set up as an emergency hospital kinda thing, making you think of rich people trying to help out when the zombie plague started maybe. Then I found a ladder going way down. At the bottom was a huge underground military/scientific complex that was clearly doing some research on the zombies. Whether they where part of the cause of the outbreak, or studying it after the fact is not clear that I could see, with the devs leaving it up to the player to infer.

Even many smaller POIs have stories. Houses with barricades to defend against the zombies. The UFO museum that might imply alien connections(or just run by UFO nuts...either way it is a fun POI). Really strange bars and stores. They clearly put alot of thought into the POIs to tell the story of the area being overrun despite everything the people and military could do.

Redress said:

Still playing alot of 7 Days To Die. One of the things I like is the storytelling in the POIs. It has a real Fallout feel to it, but without the computer terminal messages to tell the story. An example is a residence I was sent to clear out. Big mansion in the country, and when you go in, you see that they had it set up as an emergency hospital kinda thing, making you think of rich people trying to help out when the zombie plague started maybe. Then I found a ladder going way down. At the bottom was a huge underground military/scientific complex that was clearly doing some research on the zombies. Whether they where part of the cause of the outbreak, or studying it after the fact is not clear that I could see, with the devs leaving it up to the player to infer.

Even many smaller POIs have stories. Houses with barricades to defend against the zombies. The UFO museum that might imply alien connections(or just run by UFO nuts...either way it is a fun POI). Really strange bars and stores. They clearly put alot of thought into the POIs to tell the story of the area being overrun despite everything the people and military could do.

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The lost art of story telling: Show, don't tell.

Dune Spice Wars again... I played the heck out of this game earlier this year but quit out of frustration because of the bugs. I dont play multiplayer and this game is more geared towards it. The skirmish is okay but limited, though there is a conquest mode in which you try to conquer multiple territories with the ultimate goal of ruling Arrakis. I liked that bit but it glitched to the point where I lost even though I won every single battle, which was weird. Also some factions were just way overpowered and there were severe balance issues.

With the new addition of the Ixian faction I decided to try it out again and was pleasantly surprised they overhauled the conquest mode so its less buggy. Enjoyed playing House Corrino and crushed my enemies while taking over the planet. In the end, if you like multiplayer, this could be a very good game with plenty of things to keep track of. For single players like myself, the major weakness is the lack of a single player campaign mode, but overall I rate this fun enough to play, but with limited shelf life. Rating 7/10

The game i am currently playing the most is 7 days to die the horde survival crafting game. It is a one person game where there was an apocalypse then came the zombies. And there is a zombie horde event called hoard night in which the sky turns red and you have to fight massive amounts of zombies all night.

There are a variety of zombies including irradiated zombies and flying bird zombies and there are normal animals.
There are desert, forest, wasteland, and burnt biomes.

You have a character with stats and perks. you gin experience points from crafting, mining, building bases and ending zombies, and spend the points on your stats and perks.

And there are merchants you can trade stuff to and get quests from.
It is a good game but it is a tough one to play.

With a week to go till Satisfactory 1.0(which is going to be a blast), I am going to do something different: Xcom 2 modded based on what a youtuber is doing currently.

Mod list: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=3318001373

First impressions: Really well done set of mods. You can do as many covert actions at once as you want, but there are major risks involved. The UI changes are pretty nice. The amalgamation changes to character classes are fascinating. Basically, every soldier is an amalgamation of 3 classes, and a ton of classes have been added. Each level up, you can pick an ability to gain from one of the three classes. So I have a soldier with a flame thrower, who can also shoot other soldiers with healing bullets. A sniper rifle using soldier who has a combat knife for a secondary weapon. A heavy gunner with a sawed off shotgun as his secondary. And so on, so many possibilities and combinations. So far, very early on, it looks like they have done a decent job of balancing the new classes.

Great start, lots of fun, and now crashes on load. Tried everything I can think of, no joy. Very disappointed because it was a ton of fun before I tried to load back into game.

Redress said:

Great start, lots of fun, and now crashes on load. Tried everything I can think of, no joy. Very disappointed because it was a ton of fun before I tried to load back into game.

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Thats exactly how I felt when I played the mods for Dark Crusade and Vice City. Awesome stuff, but crash city.

Satisfactory 1.0 is here, and it is good. After 5 years in early access, the devs took the time to get things right, and what they added to 1.0 is really awesome stuff. The story is in place now. Placeholder items(SAM ore, Mercer Spheres and Summersloops) now have a use, and the uses are good(though I am a ways from using any of them in my new playthrough). Lots of new voice lines for the computer assistant ADA, and those are frequently hilarious. New models for some items. More ore nodes. The ability to reroll alternate recipes(godly). A new build mode for conveyors(also godly, my favorite addition). Bigger blueprints. A whole new tier of progression.

The goodness never ends, and if you like factory builder type games, this is every bit as good as Factorio, maybe better.

Quote from ADA in Satisfactory: "Remember, your efforts benefit Earth, including kittens and puppies. Do it for the kittens and puppies!"

Finished Tier 2, sent off the first parts via the space elevator, and am now ready to unlock coal power. Unfortunately, I have been way too efficient in getting things done, and need to kill time exploring while my factory builds up parts. First time this has happened to me. Not a 1.0 issue, but it is that I have too much time inn the game and am able to build faster and know where things are.

Taking a bit of a break from Diablo 4 as I am reaching the end of progression for the season, so went to Steam looking for sales and to see if anything interesting has been released.

I picked up Nightingale because I am a sucker for action/survival games and so far I like it a lot.

I had some early pains because the interface if a bit confusing, and I messed up some essential gear for my class because of it, but I can restart now that I know more.

What is it?

The game is, as stated, a Survival game with a Victorian vibe, but set in a world of fantasy where you sculpt the world you play in through Realm modifiers. I can't really explain how that works yet since I am early in my play through, but I know that my first real was dark and hard to navigate and then I got a realm card that gave me a sun and a day/night cycle (I think?) and so getting around became easier. Couldn't tell you what the story is going to be yet since I'm still building a started home and crafting starter gear.

Pros:

- The game is beautiful and the enemies so far are interesting.
- Crafting is complex but mostly approachable.
- All crafting is fairly straight forward.
- There is a world of NPCs out there to speak with and get quests from, making the game more than kill/chop/craft
- When building a structure you get to essentially blueprint it before you have the resources and then build it bit by bit.

Cons:

- Early on, without outside help, it can be really hard to figure out how to do things. My mage accidentally deconstructed his first spell scroll because I though I was equipping it.
- The interface doesn't really make a lot of sense. For instance, the "guidebook" is where you go to build structures... I think it's a translation issue.

So all told it is nicely filling the current need for an interesting survival crafting game even if, as an early access game, it has some rough edges.

Addendum, regarding the translation problems with Nightingale: Are you frustrated, looking for where the hell you learn storage plans for building storage chests?

... the starting storage is called the "Angler's Basket". It has nothing to do with fishing in the game.

Uh... wut?

I've been browsing my local Micro Center for a while now because it is time for me to start upgrading my PC.

My current PC isn't terrible, but I have been want to upgrade the RAM, but my motherboard is old and only supports up to DDR4, and maybe the graphics card (a 3080 which is nice for most games but can struggle on new titles), and my case for that system is pretty awful and I needed to noodle through a janky negative pressure layout to get descent air flow.

So I have had my eyes open for motherboards on sale, and a better case mostly, and maybe a graphics card if there was a major sale (not likely)

So today I open the website and go to clearance and open box and there was an HP Omen Desktop, 64GB of DDR-5, a neat temp isolating case, and an RTX 4090 for $2500. That was almost a $1000 mark down!

I looked to see why it was so marked down and it was simply a display model with no box or accessories... which doesn't bother me because I have all the crappy keyboards and mice I'll ever need. So I bought it.

It was more than I wanted to spend, but I wasn't going to find another deal like that for a while.

When I went in to pick it up the guy at customer service seemed genuinely excited, and told me that they were also having an in store inventory clearance sale and all open box items were marked down another 10%.

So I got a whole new PC for the cost of the graphics card alone.

It works well, and I'm posting from it right now. Ah yes, buy a $2000+ computer and mostly browse the web with it. Haha!

After conquering Dune a few more times, I am now playing Dredge: its about commanding a small fishing boat thats sort of operating in a very strange island chain where theres monster fish and strange magics going on. The mix of cartoonish graphics and Lovecraftian mystery is pretty good so far. Just started, so we'll see how it goes.

Lutherf said:

Fallout London. I've been busy so I don't have a lot of play in but it's one HECK of a mod!!

Yes, there is a HUGE issue with crashing but adding the Buffout4 fix seems to have resolved that issue.

While it's unquestionably a Fallout game it's just plain fun to explore a different region and the devs seem to have paid good attention to local locations. For example, I got stuck on one quest and Googled the name of the in game pub I was working out of and, sure as heck, it was a real location south of London.

Most of the mechanics are the same as Fallout but pretty much everything has been reskinned and renamed. At least at the beginning of the game you pretty much are forced into a melee build as guns and ammo are nowhere near as common as in Fallout. The enemies will also kick your ass so I've had to change my normal play style, at least for now.

If anyone is interested in playing I HIGHLY recommend going through GOG and just buying a fresh version of FO4GOTY because trying to downgrade an existing version is a PITA and you can't plug the mod in over anything other than a pre-update FO4 file. Besides, GOG has the FO4 edition you need for less than $20 so it's a pretty small investment for a HUGE freebie on the London mod.

This is NOT just a DLC. It's a whole new game and you can't move from FO4 to London so it's one or the other.

Click to expand...

I haven't loaded it yet, don't you have to regress Fallout to a previous build?

beefheart said:

I haven't loaded it yet, don't you have to regress Fallout to a previous build?

Click to expand...

I just bought the GOTY version through GOG instead of unwinding the existing version I had. It was less than $20 and, at least for me, the potential for frustration in doing any downgrade was well worth the money.

I'm still playing Nightingale and liking it very much. The crafting system is easily the best system I have used in any survival-craft game.

The crafting in the game is essentially the leveling system in the game. Every material you gather in the game has an intrinsic bonus when you use it for crafting.

So, for instance, a certain kind of wood grants 4% melee damage, and so lumber you create from t has +4% melee damage.... and so an axe handle that you make from the lumber has 4% melee damage, and an axe you create with that handle has, you guessed it, +4% melee damage.

Plans for gear will require between 2 and 6 materials or crafted components needed to build it, and some of those components themselves need to be crafted from 2 to 6 materials.

So the power of the weapon, or the protection of the clothing to create is an amalgam of all of the bonuses that all of your materials provided to the components that you used to construct it. Higher level gear generally takes more components and more crafted components that lower level gear which means that there are more opportunities in crafting high end gear to infuse more bonuses into the gear.

In other game all gear is built from a set required material, so like a given sword in Conan Exiles requires steel... but in Nightingale you get a plan for a sword and you can make it out of any metal you want, and that sword will have very different uses depending on the metal you use. It leads to much more involved exploration and harvesting as to search each new biome for all the different ores and wood and plant fibers to expand what I'd call a grocery list for the gear you want to build.

Finally finished Dredge. Great, nifty little fishing game that reminded me a lot of Subnautica, except that you stay on the surface lol. Usually I dont get satisfied on my first run-throughs with any game and will play it again if its fun, but I was very happy that I stumbled onto something that was important to complete the plot and so theres no need to play it a second time. I heartily recommend it, though it has very limited replayability- thats the only weakness of this game. Rating 8/10

So today I learned that Starfield has a new DLC, and apparently when I bought the original game I got the version that includes at least this first DLC. So now I am downloading the game because dammit, I payed for this.

Redress said:

So today I learned that Starfield has a new DLC, and apparently when I bought the original game I got the version that includes at least this first DLC. So now I am downloading the game because dammit, I payed for this.

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I bought that version too and I can't bring myself to play it.

Here is a gif that best depicts my feelings of my time playing Starfield:

Still playing Nightingale, nowhere near finishing the game, but I think I am approaching my personal end. That isn't a knock against the game, it's just a fairly big game and, like all survival games, the interest wanes once the survival bit has been sorted out.

There are people who play those games just for the grind and build portion, but I generally start losing interest once I have maximized all of my gear.. which I have done at this point.

I'd probably place this in my top 5 survival games. #1 and #2 are Minecraft and Subnautica with Ark, Nightingale and Conan fighting it out for #3 through #5

Ark probably takes 3 because there is just more to do with Nightingale at 4 and Conan at 5 strictly because Nightingale has a story progression.

I gotta start thinking about what I'm going to play next. I'm guessing the time would indicate that I'll be going back to Diablo 4... but I'm not sure I'm over the burnout.

I've been considering restarting Cyberpunk 2077.. but I won't know if that is going to be the choice until I launch it.

Just started playing a new game, still in "early access" on steam but clearly well into beta, and inside of a week there went 20+ hours hours in no time. Called shapez2 and it is more or less a casual yet complicated factory game with properties similar to that of Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, Factorio, and the like.

You are in no competition with anyone, nor are you on any sort of timer, but the game is deceptively complex in obtaining the shapes, organizing or cutting or stack assembling them, via production lines of delivery to the center void-like cyclone. Once you learn the game, obtain your license to assemble, you end up in and endless level of persistent optimization of production line outputs. Can I deliver more, and efficiently, to the center in a manner to increase my "operator level."

Only owning the game for a short time and I am already level 56 and in the top 12% worldwide. Between milestones, various side tasks, upgrades to things you need, this becomes an amazing time drain.

A couple shots of my current build...


And...

After finishing Dredge, Steam recommended Raft, so I played for a few days. At first it seemed fun and all, but the constant gathering of resources and plus you had to eat all the time felt like a chore in the end. Uninstalled and got a refund. Not for me. Rating 4/10