Get your game on!

[Nonentity]

@LockeCJ

I think it’s telling that the headline is about the game being safe rather than those who were previously working on it.

I should probably add that this is one of the few that I’ve seen that had any comment about the future of the game, which helps explain the focus. Information is thin at the moment, and I don’t think Take-Two has made any clarifying comments about the status of the people being laid off (aside from “the Company is rationalizing its pipeline and eliminating several projects in development and streamlining its organizational structure”, which is so much corporate word salad).

Also, KSP2’s development has been… contentious. It’s still in Early Access, was launched as such at the price of a full game, is missing the majority of the features that were supposed to set it apart from KSP1, and has suffered from a large amount of publicity interviews with its devs making extremely optimistic statements with not a lot of visible action. The game is an improvement from a visual and sound design standpoint, but there are a number of game-breaking bugs and it has been slow to move towards feature parity with its predecessor, let alone introducing the new features it was supposed to get. Whatever the reasons, it’s definitely hurt the reputations of the developers and that isn’t helping the reactions to this news.

[Nonentity]

Information is thin at the moment, and I don’t think Take-Two has made any clarifying comments about the status of the people being laid off

Wildly, almost a month later, there has still been mostly silence about KSP2 aside from some vague mentions of “support”.

This is a pretty good summary of the timeline, and details how a large game title can go quite wrong right from the start:

"Doomed from the start" - KSP2 Development History FINALLY Revealed

[Nonentity]

Humble Games reportedly lays off its entire staff

[DaakSyde]

Last couple days I’ve been playing Teardown, which I’d had on my wishlist for awhile, but just finally bought and decided to try.

It’s a heist puzzle game, where you play a demolitions specialist who has fallen on hard times and needs to take on some rather shady jobs.

So far, they’re mostly along the lines of “find some way to blast your way in, grab some things, get out, and make it back to your getaway vehicle before you get caught.”

It’s quite challenging and a lot of fun. There’s all kinds of ways you can break and enter and exit and use vehicles and stuff to travel around to get around the map. You can be really creative about that. And you have all the time you need to plan it and prepare for it (and to just wreck stuff for fun).

But once you actually start, as soon as you grab one of the objectives it sets off an alarm and you have only 60 seconds to get all the rest of them, wherever they are on the map, and get to your escape vehicle to get out, before you get busted. So you’d better plan well and demolish the right things.

Tonight’s mission was to grab GPS systems from multiple boats scattered around the map along with a computer from an upper floor of an office building and get to the exit van.

I managed to move into position and line up 3 of the boats, find a fast car to park near the 4th which was way on the other side of the map, and find a quick way to grab the computer and run out to a speedboat to bring me to the 3 lined up boats. But it took me a few tries. Once the timer was ticking I kept skidding the car into walls, sinking the speedboat, getting stuck in the boathouse, and just failing until I lined things up perfectly and cleared the path better. That better plan did it.

Even then, I finished with only 0.6 seconds left on the timer before I would’ve been caught. But I did it!
All required goals plus all the optional ones.

I highly recommend it. Most original game I’ve played in a long time. Lots of fun to try to set up the perfect heist and then that final 60 seconds when you try to actually pull it off is intense.

[RAvery]

Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur | PLAYTHROUGH | International Tabletop Day 2017

[Nonentity]

Been playing a lot of Satisfactory since it reached 1.0 status a few weeks ago. I’ve had it in my library due to a Humble Bundle for a long while, but hadn’t gotten around to playing it.

If nothing else, this game is massive. There is so much space, so many things to build, so much to uncover. Also, a massive time-sink. Exploring and building can quickly make you go “wait, where did the last few hours go?”

I’ve completed a play through of the base “story”, such as there is… although elements of the game give very definite “GlaDOS from Portal” vibes, there’s a lot of flavor but I haven’t seen a lot of overall depth. The underlying “here’s a new thing to build, that uses other things you’ve previously built” bones of the game definitely dominate.

In that first playthrough, I started out with some decently laid-out factories, and then later ended up devolving to spaghetti tangles of conveyor belts and machines spread across random parts of the landscape, with lots of manual ferrying of parts from here to there, because the game really seems to trigger a “gotta build the next part!” part of my brain. The cosmetics part of the game is also annoyingly gated behind making large numbers of things just to throw them away, which doesn’t help. I’ve decided to treat that playthrough as a technical trainer, and I’m trying to gather a few basic blueprints now before starting a new one where I intend to focus more on aesthetics than I did previously. Time shall tell whether I’m successful in that.

[howaboutthis]

Satisfactory? I’ve heard of that somewhere.

Oh yeah, Let’s Game It Out.

Although sims are not my thing (I’m more of an arcade junkie), I visit this guy’s YT channel from time to time to see which games he’s been torturing lately. He plays sims in ways the developers never intended.