Like everyone else sensible I use the trainwreck that is Star Citizen for popcorn-munching fun and actually bought Elite Dangerous instead. I’ve had this on the back burner for a while, as I’m not much of a fan of flight sims of any sort. I do have fond memories of playing Frontier: Elite II however so I thought I’d give this a go. Now that I have a bit more disposable income I thought I’d also give gaming with a proper joystick a go. I did try playing it with a standard gamepad for a bit but after having a lot of difficulty with just docking, I knew that this would be impossible. I bought a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, pretty much the cheapest on the stick on the market and was shocked by how much easier it is to control and how much more fun it is to fly ships with it.
So if you’ve watched the Starz Spartacus series, well, this is basically the video game adaptation. Sure it isn’t officially licensed, its scope is limited to the arena so no rebellion for you and it only has pixel graphics, but everything about it is clearly inspired by the show. I heard about it on Broken Forum where it was quite a hit. It is a rather short however once you understand its mechanics and it’s possible to win a full game in only a few hours.
I’ve played pretty much all of Maxis’ games back in the day but one game I missed out on was SimTower and I never forgot that. I guess it was because I was busy with the school when it came out and it was actually made by a Japanese developer and not a Will Wright design. So when I saw this pop up on Steam I was immediately intrigued. Since I never played SimTower I had to look up information on it but I believe that while the games are visually and thematically similar, they are rather different in substance.
So I said that I’d play through Fallout 4 all over again with mods and so I did, but it turned out that all I needed was the comprehensive Horizon overhaul mod. For a while I did have Survival Options because I can’t live without save-anywhere but Horizon has this covered as well. I won’t list everything this mod does because it’s too huge and I feel like I’ve barely touched the settlement management bits but I will go into what I liked about it and what I think could be improved.
So I’ve been playing Fallout 4 for a while now. I got way more engaged in it than I thought I would considering that my initial impression of it is that its production values are barely any better than the previous game and there are all kinds of annoying bugs and glitches. But the sheer size of the game and the variety of the environments you can explore really won me over. The settlement construction portion of the game is both frustrating and time consuming but I have to admit that it’s pretty addictive.
So I’ve just gotten around to starting Fallout 4. Since this looks like it’s going to take a long time to play, I thought I’d also check out its free to play companion game which was good enough to get some praise on Broken Forum. It plays a lot like those free games on Facebook or whatever, though it’s not too annoying and is charming enough. You can indeed spend real money to speed things but as far as I can tell, everything that you can buy can indeed be obtained in-game so it’s honest in that regard.
This was very popular for a while on Broken Forum and I was very interested in it but waited until it went on discount before buying it. I was also apprehensive about it being too difficult and in particular I have a hard time getting too far into rogue-like games. As it turned out, I found the difficulty level to be high but manageable. What got me down however is how grindy reaching the end of the game is.
