It doesn’t fit me at all, but I’m curious to see how it goes and how it changes things, if it does.
I have a decent PC with a library of Steam and GOG games as well as ones installed from other sites or CD/DVD. No desire to have to play games through a browser, nor have them all always be dependent on a remote service and a good internet connection. But for people on a Chromebook or Mac, it might be pretty nice to finally get to play games even with those limitations.
There’s a more specific bandwidth tester here
https://projectstream.google.com/speedtest
(It’s really harsh. I have 100 up/ 100 down,)
Based on your current download speed of 18.667 Mbps , we expect you’ll be able to play in high definition on Stadia, but you might not get 4K resolution.
Can anyone suggest good co-op games without too much card shuffling? or too much space required?
Pandemic has great ideas, but I’m frustrated with the multi-stage card shuffling.
Pandemic: The Cure switches to dice, which looks like it should help.
Any other suggestions?
Forbidden Island is basically a simplified & faster version of Pandemic.
(usual Tabletop video, some effects in the intro but not much)
It’s available as an iOS app as well as the physical boardgame. It still uses cards, but it’s nowhere near as fiddly as Pandemic.
Your download speed of 5.149 Mbps is below the 10 Mbps we recommend to stream games on Stadia. Improve your Internet connection and then check it again.
Sounds about right.
Based on your current download speed of 39.098 Mbps , we expect you’ll have a high-performance gaming experience on Stadia.
Not bad for a little fishing village in rural Tasmania.
That’s a standard-speed NBN account, BTW. If I wanted to pay for premium service, I could get it much faster.
I live in a condominium, in a light urban area. It may be that the Wifi frequencies are oversubscribed. (Mesh networks might make things even worse)
Thanks, I can’t handle the background music for the review. Does it require a lot of card shuffling?
As with Pandemic, there are two decks; one contains the cards that the players are trying to collect sets from (“good stuff”), one contains the cards that control the bad stuff that’s threatening them (disease outbreaks in Pandemic, flooding in Forbidden Island). As with Pandemic, the good stuff deck has a limited amount of extra-bad events periodically scattered through it (Epidemic cards in Pandemic, Waters Rise cards in Forbidden Island) that accelerate the bad stuff.
Both decks need to be shuffled at the start of the game, and shuffled again after the players run through the deck (which might happen two or three times during a game). As with Pandemic, the discard pile of the bad stuff deck is shuffled back in whenever one of the extra-bad cards appears.
The “board” is also constructed from tiles, which are shuffled at the start of the game before being laid out.
So, in short: there is some shuffling involved, but not quite as much as in Pandemic. And the board is much smaller, the game is much faster (less than an hour to play), and there aren’t a zillion fiddly little game pieces like Pandemic’s disease markers.
Here’s a how-to-play with potentially less offensive background music:
Incidentally, Amazon sells electronic shuffling machines for about $15 in the USA.
Thank you. I’ve learned to shuffle each deck 7 times, which works out to at least 42 shuffles before starting Pandemic. Which is why I find it frustrating.
P.S. Found the Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert rules on BGG. Neither requires as many shuffles as Pandemic.
Interesting…
your current download speed of 16.121 Mbps
Yet from speedtest.net
277.13 Mbps
Then going back to the projectstream link:
your current download speed of 290.527 Mbps
That’s a pretty significant difference.
DEFCON is on sale for $1.99 on GOG through tomorrow. I’ve had it on my list for awhile as ‘looks cool but not full price’ because it’s real-time and aimed strongly at multiplayer. Decided to give it a try.
Started a game against the AI and didn’t notice that it defaults to starting at doublespeed, so while I was figuring out controls and deciding where to place things, I missed my chance to deploy. (You have to deploy all your units before it reaches defcon 3.)
Started another game, remembered to slow it down to 1:1 time, deployed all of my units, then tried to figure out how to pause. The manual mentions hitting ESC twice to minimize, so I did that to see if it would pause when minimized. The game vanished and wasn’t in the taskbar. I thought it had crashed. Went to dinner, came back, did some other stuff, and tried to play again. But the button was greyed out in GOG, which is usually what it does when a game is running.
I finally found it not in the taskbar, but in the systray. It was now over 2 hours into the game. The AI was winning about 130 to -70. The Soviet Union had annihilated my Mexican cities and structures, and nukes were now raining down on South America. But my silo placement had been good enough that hardly any of them were getting through. So I started giving my fleets and air units orders to move out across the oceans. Kept my silos in defense mode. By the time I was in position to begin attacking, I think the enemy had launched most of their nukes, and I hadn’t run into any of their fleets (they were all sitting off my west coast). Ended up winning 82 to 50. 
That whole incident reminded me of when I used to play Microprose’s CHQ via modem against one of my friends in middle school. He tended to fall asleep during the game, then wake up some time later and just start nuking everything to trigger nuclear winter and get it over with so he could go to bed.
The game does have that Cold War atmosphere, strategic command screen display styled to look like the screen in the Wargames movie. The real-time play isn’t too bad since it mostly plays out pretty slow at 1:1 time (and you can enable pause, though it’s hidden in advanced options). Does appear it would be better in multiplayer though. Not bad for $1.99.
Ghost Stories has one deck of nasties to shuffle at the beginning of the game and a game board that is randomized. It’s got a fairly cheesy theme and is rather difficult.
The 7th Continent is a co-op game with limited replay value that doesn’t have much shuffling at all… games take a while to complete. Also really difficult.
Overall, most co-op games have a pretty major shuffling component in them.
Have you played Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective? No replay value at all, but it’s pretty meaty stuff. No shuffling either. Sherlock’s a better detective than I am…
The test said that I would get 43.448 and I have a 200/200 setup with high grade Wi-Fi. Not sure how they calculate this but it seems…off to say the least.
I just discovered that this exists:
Wow. That’s tempting. If for no other reason to put it on the shelf with my other games.
Sporting events at the Billings Community Center are ending in angry outbursts, and in the woods nearby, sightings of The Manifested Concept Of Rage are becoming more and more frequent. Could the two be related?
An entrepreneur moves to Montana and opens up a petting zoo for creatures of The Void. They claims the cages are secure, but when a big storm rolls into Billings some of the creatures escape. Was this their plan all along?
Your reverse twin shows up with a mysterious box, looking for a place to stay.
Strange noises are heard from the basement of the Billings Library at night.
These adventures and more await you in The Tingleverse: The Official Chuck Tingle Role-Playing Game, which thrusts you directly into the middle of your very own Chuck Tingle story.
This rulebook contains everything a group of buckaroos will need, including four playable types (bigfoot, dinosaur, human, and unicorn), five trots (bad boy, charmer, sneak, true buckaroo, and wizard), several unique ways, as well as hundreds of cool moves that are specially crafted for each unique play style.
Within these 270+ pages you will also find various magical items and a menagerie of monsters, ranging from pesky Void crabs to this villainous Ted Cobbler himself.
The only question left is: what are you waiting for? The adventure begins now!
I call dibs on a Bigfoot Buckaroo
So I’ve been playing World of Warcraft Classic for the last few days. This is the world as it was 15 years ago. Vanilla. None of the innovations or play-testing changes that have evolved with the modern version of the game.
It’s a lesson in masochism. All of the things that used to bother me about the game bother me all the same now. I usually play spell casters, and the need for mana is real. In the modern version, using up your mana is a rarity. In the Classic version, it’s every 45 seconds. It’s easing up, but there has been such a glut at the low-level levelling areas, that accomplishing your quests is a lot harder because there is so much competition.
It’s a lot harder to play.
I’ve preordered the bundle with the controller and a Chromecast ultra.
I played with it a bit during the Project Stream test, and it worked well enough.
I have a plenty fast internet connection with bandwidth to spare, but I don’t yet have a 4K TV, so I’m not really going to see the limits of this.
If they could just figure out a way to import my Steam library, I’d be set. As it stands, I’m not particularly inclined to purchase from yet another store, but I’m interested enough to at least give it a try. I’m hoping they at least roll out something similar to Microsoft Game Pass so that I’m not stuck paying for the service and also paying for the games.
