While I’m sure this thread was probably meant to discuss video games, I cant help but want to play this board game now that I know it exists:
Of course, given that it’s currently $50 on Amazon, it will probably be awhile before I get the chance to try it out…
O_o
Honestly, even though video games are the more popular (probably because a lot of them can be played alone) for threads like this, tabletop games are just as valid. I would play more if I had people to hang out with. 
I think that in decently sized cities, board game meetups are a thing… I go to a biweekly (bimonthly?) meetup and get my boardgame fix at a local boardgame cafe. It’s great! Get to play all those 8-10 player social deduction games my small circle of friends can’t account for, like Resistance: Avalon and Secret Hitler. Also get to try new games out since it is a board game cafe with a selection of games that would be unreasonably expensive for me to obtain. The only thing boardgame meetups isn’t good for is for playing some of the longer, deeper games… I wouldn’t try and play the Game of Thrones boardgame or Twilight Imperium at a meetup.
I thought MGSV was perhaps the best in the series (mechanically at least). Yeah the story is ridiculous and incomplete, and the less said about Quiet’s outfit the better (even though her storyline was great). It was just so damn good. In some twisted ways the futility of the end-game kind of further drives home some of the game’s themes. Once you peel into the layers there’s just so much to like and such insane attention to detail sprinkled throughout. Even after playing it for nearly 200 hours I was still finding and discovering new things and tricks. (Did you know you can Fulton yourself?)
Plus there’s something to be said for flying into a war zone blasting Gloria and launching rockets at everybody.
ETA if you enjoyed MGSV I highly recommend both Ground Zeros if you can get it for cheap. It’s often on sale. MGSV happens immediately after GZ and it fills out some of the plot details. I also recommend Peace Walker (PS3/Xbox 360/Vita only unfortunately). It’s very much like MGSV and as a bonus also has Fulton extractions and base management as a mechanic. PW is very much a proto-MGSV.
I thought The Turing Test was a great little game. Had a Portal vibe and some neat gameplay. Definitely far too short though.
I saw an article about the release of Bridge Constructor: Portal and picked it up on Steam. So far I’m playing through regular Bridge Constructor and it’s a lot more challenging than I’d have expected. I work for an engineering software company but I’m not an engineer…
Since most of the challenge comes from severely limited budgets, my spouse calls it as “The Red State Civil Engineering Game.”
Played through Exit: The Game - The Abandoned Cabin today. I saw this one in an Ars Technica story about the best board games. The game is essentially a board game translation (though without an actual board) of “escape room” puzzles, with a sort of choose-your-own-adventure mechanic of solving puzzles and advancing through the game that is facilitated by a decoder wheel and several sets of ordered cards.
As we’ve established, I tend to like puzzlers - I haven’t played any escape-room-type games before, but I’m aware of them and I’ve dabbled with a few ARG-style games. The person I played with is a bit less into puzzles than I am, but isn’t bad at them… mostly just lacks experience.
This ended up being a very interesting game. We barely squeaked by completing it under the 2-hour time window and ended up using a couple of clues, so our “score” was 5 stars out of 10… considering that it’s our first experience with that kind of thing, I’ll take it. I may have leapt to the solution a few times more than my partner, but we both had several “eureka” moments so It didn’t feel one-sided. The puzzles varied quite a bit - they are all built around discovering a 3-digit combination, but the methods of getting that combination were quite different from puzzle to puzzle and the difficulty ramped up pretty smoothly as we went further along the path.
The high side: for under $15 for two hours of cooperative fun, it’s way cheaper than a movie. There’s also not a solid built-in win/loss condition - you can get a score based on the amount of time you took and the number of hints used, but any completion is still a “win”.
The low side: the puzzles are, of course, entirely static, so there isn’t any replay value. There are several different “adventure” versions available to buy, but each one is actually designed for a one-time use: the fastest solution sometimes involves damaging parts of the game. We were very gentle on it and ended up keeping it in almost pristine condition, but doing that probably slowed our final time down a little bit.
Overall, I’d definitely say this was worth the cost for two hours of fun and a mental workout, and if it’s kept in decent enough condition to pass on to someone else then that’s a nice bonus.
We played this for the first time on Christmas Eve and it was pretty fun. Sort of between Magic: The Gathering if every card was blue, and Munchkin – it’s all about changing the rules and screwing over everyone else.
I feel I’m about to slip into Town of Salem, again.
It’s basically Mafia with microtransactions and ads. Add to the mix idiot teens with offensive usernames, townies who can’t even logic, and random mob lynching, and it’s somehow enjoyable. If you can get into a lobby with a “theme”, the camraderie and backstabbing is totally worth it.
(For sheer lunacy, try an Any/All mode)
If you’re looking for a good secret role game you can play in a browser, try Kraplow:
I absolutely adored the original Life is Strange so I was pretty jazzed to hear that the series was being revisited with not one, but two new games in the series. The first title which was announced was, of all things, a prequel to Life is Strange called Before the Storm.
As a fan of LIS I was pretty worried about this title when it was in development – it wasn’t being done by the original developer, the original VA for the principal character was changed (because of the VA strike), it had none of the supernatural elements of the original, and of course, it was a prequel to a seemingly well trod story.
I’m pleased to report that while not as good as LIS, it was still a worthy title in the series and pretty damn good as a whole.
Despite it being a prequel (and you ultimately knowing where the characters end up) it still manages to do a great job telling a compelling story. Rather than focusing on the events that lead into LIS (any foreshadowing is pretty oblique and subtle) it focuses on the relationship between the two characters and their very intense relationship. You could actually play through BTS without spoiling anything in LIS if you played them in chronological order.
It didn’t suffer too much from prequel-itis – characters that would be in the later series are introduced in a way that makes sense and not just for fan service or because they had to be there. As usual, there’s tons of easter eggs and little details for nerds like me to obsess over.
I took my time and really explored everything the game had to offer, so my total playtime was around 9 hours for all three chapters but it can be completed in around 3-4 hours if you rush through everything.
There’s a bonus “prequel to the prequel” episode coming out in the next couple of months that I’m eagerly awaiting. Then there’s the LIS2 sequel coming out sometime in the indeterminate future (hoping for more news at this year’s E3).
I just can’t get enough of LIS.
I’m still playing Temple Run 2. I’ve unlocked all coin-cost characters, four alternate outfits, and the second map, Frozen Shadows. Yay me!
But… I’ve noticed I have an older version of the game (1.35.) The current version is 1.43.1. For some unknown reason, the Amazon Appstore (I play on my Kindle) hasn’t pushed out the update. I downloaded the new version’s APK. The question is: can I install the new APK without losing my progress?
I’ve noticed the game saves at least one file every session (gamedata.txt), and I can make a backup copy of the file pretty easily. As far as I can tell, it’s the only save file generated. So should I dare upgrade? Because I do NOT want to start again from square one. 
Can you install the newer version as a seperate app see if it plays nice before you get rid of the old one or will it just overwrite it?
I’m not sure. I don’t know that much about Android. But I think it will overwrite the old one. I’m going to call Customer Service again today and see what they say, but the person I got yesterday wasn’t sure how to do it. She gave me the number to the Appstore people. They might know.
If only life itself had save game files. Then you can save your progress now, try the APK, and if it erases your game progress, then you can just say “never mind” and just reload your life to its earlier state and restore everything to how it used to be.
This might work well for blind dates as well. Man, one could make a fortune…!
Thinking about it, if you can back up your save file…then shouldn’t you be able to install from the APK, and if it doesn’t work, uninstall and then reinstall from the Amazon store? You’d be back to where you began?
To add to that, Google Play uses cloud storage for most of the games that force you to sign in. I’ve changed phones in the past and carried on with the same save files without any problem.
Figuring out whether or not the save file is stored locally is a bit more problematic though. @Nightflyer, is there any reason you absolutely need the update now? I’ve found that games tend to push out updates in stages, so you might find that you get the update in a few days anyway…
In other news, I snapped and bought Elite: Dangerous in the new year Steam sale, along with (ahem) a few other titles that have been on my wish list for ages.
It’s an amazing game but its gradual evolution is immediately apparent to a relative late-comer such as myself. Perhaps “game” is not the right word; it’s an amazing (actual) universe that functions by itself and, unless you take the time to learn what you need for yourself, it’s not going to teach you anything.
After 20+ hours in the game, I’m still not comfortable with combat; the risks seem too high and the rewards seem too meagre. Knowing this, I ran data for the galactic factions within a cluster of star systems that were each close enough together for the standard starting ship to be able to travel amongst them easily. Data is a good place to start, it would seem, because you don’t need physical storage space and can just jump from star to star, teaching yourself the controls and figuring out how the universe works.
Yesterday, I finally saved up enough for a new ship and decided to outfit it for mining. I took my ship out for a trial run and was impressed by the results but I wanted more.
I looked up where to find a decent mining spot online (there is a lot of that) and realised I needed to travel 100 light years away. Even in my shiny new ship, that still took me an hour, in combined travel time and figuring out what the fuck the weird galaxy map is supposed to be. I got to my destination but the planet that I wanted wasn’t on the system map; half an hour of googling, half an hour of figuring it out by myself later, I found what I was looking for.
Flying into a planetary ring at several times light speed, jumping out of the wormhole and seeing thousands of mineable objects around me was a genuinely awesome moment.
However, two hours of mining later, my cargo hold and my bladder were both full and, given that you can’t ever pause the game, I put my ship into hyperdrive and went for a much needed piss. I got back to see my spaceship’s dashboard erupt in flame as a CPU pirate (according to Google, they hang around outside planetary rings, waiting for miners carrying valuable minerals) torched my ship and stole the products of many hours’ grind.
I rage quit at that moment and went to bed. Woke up this morning to find a bug had stripped out all of the expensive refit I bought for my ship and now I had nothing. Not even a shield generator, and no money to buy a new one. Bug report filed, currently awaiting a resolution.
Apart from the final bug, though, I’m totally happy with my purchase. Mining a planetary ring of ice rocks while listening to blues was absolutely one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had, not least because the game didn’t spoon-feed it to me.
Tl;Dr: make sure your bladder is bigger than your cargo capacity in a game you can’t pause.
UPDATE: I got a very nice email from their customer support politely explaining that it seems I clicked “repurchase all” twice on the insurance menu (I blame the incoherent rage, not the beer) which, of course, deselects all of the components because it makes much more sense that two clicks means “I want to buy all of these items again (if I can find them for sale) at full market value and not the 5% insurance cost.” Because that’s entirely a logical thing that should be easy to click by accident.
The very nice customer service rep reinstated all of my purchases though, despite it technically being my error. Looks like it’s going to be a smooth jazz and ice mining evening in the Cynical household tonight…
No, there isn’t. It looks like changes were made on the fourth map/stage, and I’m still on the second. So I’m holding off for now. I did email the game company with my question, just to see what happens.
I had seen how great the reviews were for Life Is Strange, but it didn’t sound like the type of game that I normally enjoy. Then it popped up on the new year’s sale and for some reason I decided that I just had to have it. Starting to get into it, looks like there’s a good story forming. 
Started playing L.A. Noire yesterday, after finishing a third run of Dishonored 2. Been on the backlog for 5 or 6 years, so better late than never.
It’s pretty good - similarities to the (later) criminal investigations in Assassin’s Creed Unity but far better done.
My only real issues are every time it boots up, I remember “oh yeah - Team Bondi was that studio that was apparently really shitty to work in, even when measured against other game studios”, and also damn, it makes the fans in my PS3 work overtime. Great thing to have happen in a heatwave 
