I’m currently going through The Turing Test, which was marked down in the Halloween sale. It’s not exceedingly difficult, and a little predictable too, but it’s scratching my puzzle itch.
I’ve also been playing Engare, which is a neat little geometry/math puzzle game. Ars Technica reviewed it recently, and it got my interest. It can be mildly frustrating at points, but gives very satisfying spirograph-like pattern payoffs when solutions are found.
With a predilection for puzzle games, I do hope you’ve had a chance to take The Talos Principle for a spin by now, yes?
Looks like I got that one in 2015 (wow, time flies), and 100% achievements. The Turing Test is really reminding me heavily of that one, due to some similarity in puzzle mechanics and a focus on philosophy and thought experiments. The Turing Test seems like it has a more limited scope, however.
In that case, I may very well have to pick up The Turing Test, especially if it’s marked down for the holiday.
With mention of a focus on philosophy and thought experiments, I do hope you’ve had a chance to take SOMA for a spin as well. I really enjoyed Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but feel SOMA may have been Frictional’s finest hour. Also on sale for Halloween!
Yup, and it is way better than it has any reason to be.
This it totally playable by yourself, but it works really well with 3 other people. I’ve played it with two different groups, including some more casual gamers, and it went over very well. Even with 4, there’s more tasks than players in many cases, so there’s still some juggling involved.
Also good for couch co-op:
Apparently I own this. It looks pretty rad. I should probably play it some time.
I do think Mario Kart is a good choice. There are options for automatically accelerating and steering, although neither will prevent him from participating. They are set per-player, so you can play your way and he can play his. It’s silly, but the plastic wheel to stick the controller in is pretty great for a kid.
Mario + Rabbids and Mario Odyssey can be good for spectator co-op, and there is a 2-player mode in Odyssey where one player is Mario and the other is Cappy (the hat). You mentioned earlier that you don’t care for Mario games, so it may not be a good fit in that case. It is absolutely a Mario 3D platformer, although it does differentiate itself from 64, Sunshine, and the Galaxy games in what I’ve played so far.
Another game my daughter is more interested in watching than playing is Shantae: 1/2 Genie Hero. It’s a 2D platformer with an interesting art style and fantastic animation. It’s also pretty brutal, so if platformers are not your thing, definitely stay away.
Stardew Valley can work if you involve them in decisions like naming the animals, what crops to plant, what gifts to give, what to focus on today (farming, foraging, fishing, mining, etc.)
If I think of any others, I’ll let you know.
SOMA has been on my wishlist for a while, but I’m trying to limit my spend so it’ll probably have to wait for another sale. The info I’ve seen has me very interested, though.
I wasn’t able to get into Amnesia for some reason… the trailers I saw seemed like it would be a good fit, but when I started playing it just didn’t grab me. Not entirely sure why.
One note: it is definitely smaller in scope and easier. I’ve just finished The Turing Test, with 7 hours played… for comparison, I have 41 hours for The Talos Principle. I had fun with it, though… it was a nice break from other things, and the puzzles had enough difficulty to be satisfying to solve. I was already familiar with the philosophical topics, so I kept wanting to argue points, but that’s going to be an issue with any of this genre of game, I think.
Okay, Mario Kart it is, for now. I’ll also be able to bring it down to the Waetherman Family X-Mas, which should be fun with multiple kids around. Can four people play Mario Kart? Two JoyCons required? I guess I could also get Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime to bring down as well. That requires two JoyCons I assume?
You can use two pairs of JoyCons, or a combination of JoyCons and Pro Controllers. I think there may be a problem with using more than 2-3 JoyCon pairs due to Bluetooth limits, but that shouldn’t be a problem for most people due to the cost. A pair of JoyCons is like $80 and a Pro Controller is like $70, so the JoyCons are a better deal if you’re trying to enable 4-player. I’m assuming the same for Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, but I’ve only played it on the Xbox One. Nintendo has pretty good iconography for which play styles are available for a particular game in their store.
OK, because I have poor impulse control, I can now confirm a few things:
Picked up another puzzle game currently on sale on Steam: The Room Two. Currently going for $0.49. Very Myst-like in atmosphere, though with much less freedom of movement and more focus on an individual set of puzzle objects at a time.
I grabbed Zuma’s Revenge and Peggle Nights from Steam. I’m really on the cutting edge of gaming here 
Watch Dogs will be free on Uplay for the next week.
This of course is dependent on you a) wanting to play Watch Dogs, and b) willing to have Uplay 
Zachtronics made a new game, which may be their most accessible yet. It also has an exceedingly clever solitaire game in it like in Shenzhen I/O. And like the last game, I expect they will likely release Sigmar’s Garden as a stand-alone game.
Also, it allows you to export your solutions as animated gifs:
I finally finished Breath of the Wild! I had worked through all of it and then got a little burned out, decided to take a break. I ended up taking more than a month off, and in that time I almost lost the plot, but when I came back to it this week it was like riding a bike. Had to hone my combat skills a bit and grind my way up to some upgraded armor before taking on Calamity Ganon but in the end it wasn’t that hard. What an ending though!
Also, played my first “real” video game with my son this week. Took @LockeCJ’s suggestion and got Mario Kart. My son loves it, even if he’s not so good yet. I’m starting him off playing with the joystick instead of the motion controls because I thought it would actually be easier for him, but I’m not so sure. Either way though, using a joystick is an essential life skill and he’s better off learning it early. 
Finished Uncharted 4 last night. Very good game, put me in the mood to dust off my PS3 and play the first three again. Although I’ve got Dishonored 2 sitting there…
Mario Kart 8 is great fun! We got it for the Wii U, for which we have the Gamepad, one Pro Controller (that’s the one shaped kinda like an Xbox controller) and two Remotes. I prefer using the Remotes with motion control for steering. My daughter likes using the thumbsticks on the Gamepad. We play in pairs or in groups of up to four when they have friends over. It’s always a hoot, as long as nobody has too much of a cutthroat competitive attitude.
But it sure helps to have a big-ass TV for multiplayer.
In my ongoing quest to get a few more achievements in old games I’ve set aside, I started playing Type:Rider again.
Pros: Very interesting game idea, lots of info about different fonts, extremely fun to go whizzing and bouncing through levels.
Cons: Very floaty & bouncy controls, makes movement quite random. On later levels, it becomes extremely easy for an errant bounce to end up placing you in an inescapable position.
I liked this one to start with, but got more and more frustrated as I went on. Then I reached the “bonus level” at the end, and started laughing and was entirely ready to take back all the horrible things I’d muttered about the game designers… and then several deaths later on a level with no checkpoints (and absolutely horrible soundtrack… the level is basically one long troll), I was back to cursing again.
Final reaction: I’m glad I played it, but also I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to put a game in my “completed” category and delete it from the drive. If I ever get the second achievement (out of two) in The Witness, it might surpass that.
I’ve been playing Fortnite’s free Battle Royale mode. It’s been surprisingly fun although I’m not very good at it and it’s not the type of thing I normally play. The premise is that 100 people skydive onto an island and scavenge for weapons and healing supplies, while running to avoid being killed by a deadly storm, and the last one standing wins. The storm closing in continually shrinks (and moves) the space where you can survive, so you can’t just hide out. But stealth really helps. So far I’ve played against about 2500 other people and only gotten 3 kills, but placed top 10 in 25% of my games, 4th - 6th place about 1/6th of the time.
Last night I found a bush costume, put it on, snuck around a hill, saw another bush moving and shot it. That bush had a sniper rifle! Looted it and saw another bush that was waddling down the hill across the valley. Took a few long-range pot-shots before that bush ducked into cover. Ran and hid behind a rock, then started building a wall to try to have a safe place but someone with a much higher vantage point noticed the wall being built and shot me - I got 4th place.
Probably not something I’ll play long-term, but it’s a quick and fun diversion. Most games last less than 10 minutes.
Today I spent some time installing, removing DRM, patching, and configuring Silent Hunter III to work on Windows 10 along with a couple of mods and the SH3 Commander program. That’s a much slower, long-term, in-depth epic campaign game. But by the time I had it ready to play I had put enough time in for one day. 
I have also played this. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds appears to be the current King of the Hill and standard bearer of this emerging genre, but Fortnite’s implementation is both free and available on console.
Some of the very best games can basically be reduced to story-telling tools. What initially drew me to Minecraft many years ago was a written account of one player’s adventures, and various LPs on YouTube. It can be argued that even in the Battle Royale case, that these are systems-driven instead of narrative-driven, even if some of those systems are being controlled by other players.
At RockPaperShotgun’s suggestion, I picked up Superflight on Steam for $2.69. A blocky but gorgeous wingsuit flying game in a set of little procedurally generated pocket universes. It’s relaxing or exhilirating and scary depending on how aggressively you go for the big points.
It’s one of those games that’s great when you just want to play for a few minutes, but with some practice (or a sense of self-preservation) you can keep going for quite a while.
The backer preview version of Indivisible was released today, so I’ve been playing through a bit of it.
I was a big fan of Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2), and the music in this (done by the same composer) is a big nostalgia hit. The games are completely different, but the control system is similarly quirky… Indivisible is a side-scroller action game until you enter a fight, at which point it becomes a sort of hybrid between a fighting game and an RPG.
I’m still getting a handle of it… when you enter a fight, you can be in control of an entire party, with controller buttons corresponding to specific party members. A little tough to explain, and while it can be quite intuitive there are still parts of it that I have a little trouble tracking: for instance, you often need to block with specific party members, and while I’m easily able to translate from this button push = specific member attacking, I’m having a hard time going from specific member being attacked = push this button to block.
The backer preview is entirely focused on the mechanics, there’s none of the final game’s story in it so I can’t speak to that. There has clearly been a lot of work put into the character of the game, so I have pretty high hopes for it. Final release date is supposed to be some time next year.
