Finished Far Cry 5 yesterday. As far as pure gameplay, it was perhaps the best yet. Story was eeeehhhhh though, and that ending…
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Theres something called flame in the flood going free on the humble bundle today.
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So I finally got round to finishing off the last couple of story missions in Far Cry 5 and holy shit, I really wish I hadn’t.
This article (heavy spoiler warning, naturally) sums up my thoughts pretty succinctly and satisfyingly swearily:
Far Cry 5 is objectively the worst piece of writing I have ever encountered in any form of media. I knew there was a lot of complaining about it but I figured it was just the internet outrage machine kicking in. Nope, it’s genuinely that bad.
After fast forwarding the credits to the end, I restarted the game, reloaded all the outposts, fast-travelled to the nearest helicopter/weapon spawn point, queued up Ride of the Valkyries on Spotify, and blew the absolute bejeezus out of the nearest enemy base from a combat-loaded Huey just as the sun rose.
Pretty much all of my outrage against the game dissipated in that single moment. That is the ending I will remember once I have drunk enough beer to scrub my mind of the official one. I still love the game but that’s very much despite the story and its utterly cack-handed implementation, not because of it.
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I saw that one yesterday, grabbed it, and played a little last night. Interesting mix of features, sort of like a cross between a roguelike and a survival sim. Doesn’t do much teaching, but many of the systems seem to reveal themselves fairly organically, so long as you try everything.
I managed to survive a few days, trap some rabbits, and make some fur-lined gloves before I got killed by a boar. The death was kind of disappointing, since I couldn’t figure out anything to do against the boar other than just try to dodge it when it charged.
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How like life… 
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Second attempt, and you do get to pass on a small number of resources to your next life. I did much better in terms of resources, but ended up dead due to a boar again.
Note to future selves: boars are not messing around. No matter how many juicy resources or resting places are in the area, don’t bother with anything you can’t grab on the run. From a quick google, it appears that killing one would require either much better resources than I had, or a LOT of luck (need a spear trap or bow and arrow as weapons. Or alternatively, a wolf (a danger in itself…), or two different snakes to bite it…)
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Huh, it seems that Far Cry: Blood Dragon probably has the most believable story in the series 
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Buy your Willams/Bally tables for Pinball Arcade now…
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The thing that especially pissed me off about ending was that even though it felt completely out of left field, apparently there were clues throughout the game like news reports in radio broadcasts, color conversations, and so on.
Things that in 30+ hours that I never heard or otherwise completely missed.
If there were in-game clues leading to the events of the ending, they were so damn subtle and easy to miss that they may as well have not been there at all.
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Third attempt on Flame in the Flood, and I completed the campaign. I did die twice, but was playing a mode that has checkpoints… since I’d gotten far enough along to trigger a checkpoint, the deaths weren’t game-ending.
Fun game, and I’ll probably play it more. There is a lot that I did not get to on this play-through. I did find that the secret to surviving (for me, at least) was to immediately leave any areas with animals other than rabbits (bravely running away, Sir Robin style…), until I was finally able to build some weapons that could take down larger animals. Once I had that down, the biggest threats were cold/rain, being caught by surprise by snakes or wolves, or getting caught in a nighttime lightning storm while trying to raft through the treacherous rapids the game frequently throws at you.
Even though it’s a randomly-generated roguelike, the campaign mode does have a definite storyline, and a solid ending, which is nice. It did take a good while to get through, though… I have 7 hours played on the game, and the first two attempts couldn’t have been more than an hour.
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Is anyone gaming on Ubuntu LTS 18.04? I was thinking of downloading a couple games for my maternity leave, but it looks like Steam isn’t stable?
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I’m still on 16 and am playing metro 2033 on it just fine, don’t know if there are any issues with 18.
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I feel like I finally have a good grasp on Battletech now. Mostly it’s about specialization and the wisdom of more experienced players.
- Have a defender stand in front and soak up attacks. If they have to brace for stability/defense instead of shooting, that’s fine.
- Have someone with the Sensor Lock skill in a close support mech. Let them paint targets for your artillery but stay in safety as much as possible, then switch to fighting when necessary.
- Have an artillery mech. Make whatever sacrifices are necessary to fit as many LRMs as possible on it – four empty energy weapon hardpoints might make me itch a little but it’s just fine if it means I can rain 45 missiles per turn onto an enemy unit that can’t even see me.
- Maybe the fourth is a sniper/fire support mech but also favors LRMs for a little extra push. The rules prevent a single unit from knocking an enemy prone in one turn, so this can provide an extra shove.
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Anno 2205. Dear gods, why did I even start playing this game?
Even as I’m playing it, I’m fully aware that it’s essentially an Excel spreadsheet with a fancy GUI. I fix everything, boost my economy until it’s swollen to bursting, colossally overspend and then spend the next couple of hours fixing everything again.
I hate myself for playing it but it’s just so satisfying…
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Is there a name for that genre?
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Spot the difference.
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As opposed to Redoubtable Downtown Space Abbey which to me is an Excel spreadsheet with some role playing wrapped around it.
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Although I haven’t tried Anno 2205, your experience sounds very similar to my own with Patrician III. Highly recommended for those with the itch to manage an economy. Also one of the best supply/demand models I’ve seen in games where one can’t merely dump every last bit of Cargo_X at the same price. Every purchase or sale shifts the unit price in the local port and every port consumes resources depending on the state of population and local industry. Fostering the growth of other towns so that they need more of what you’re producing without problems of oversupply and flooding the market is a delightful balancing act.
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Speaking of economic games, anyone play the Capitalism series? I hadn’t played in awhile but I recently got some DLCs for Capitalism Lab to be able to try out some new things and started a new game with Digital Age and Subsidiaries turned on, aiming to build a big PC/Software/Internet megacorp.
The thing I had trouble with before was the increase in micromanagement as the company grows - once you have a bunch of businesses in a bunch of cities, it becomes a lot of work just keeping things going. There are headquarters departments and executives you can hire to handle stuff for you, but I never quite got the hang of that.
There’s also a City Economic Sim DLC that sounds as though it’d be a bit like Sim City, but with the added interaction that your company can contribute to a candidates election fund for mayor, affect things like unemployment (by building businesses) and land values (by donating civic buildings - near your real estate, of course) and in turn if you control the mayor you can do things like have the government universities research tech that would be useful to your company, or use eminent domain to push competitors’ businesses to the outskirts of the city. Sounds interesting, but I haven’t tried it yet.
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