What games are you playing and why?

I feel you there. It manages to mix things up but there's only so much you can do with such a simplistic combat system before you need to take a break, I'm reaching that point now and I'm halfway through Lostlight...

 

Minecraft - Okay, I was playing it, then I died so I'll probably not play it for ages and even then I'll start a new map despite having been given a good one. Ah well. That's what I'm like.

SotS: The Pit - I *really* didn't take to it on release. Or with the first expansion. Or with the second. It wasn't until I got a second copy in the Humble Weekly Roguelike bundle that I really took to it. I loaded it up, picked the Tarka Ranger, and my first run lasted over an hour and I got to floor 17 - assisted a few times by goshdarned wormhole traps. Towards the end of that run I was running out of energy (as in *me*, not my character), and an encounter I screwed up ended up with me losing half my inventory and by that point I just let myself get killed. But hey. It's fun. And now I don't have to uninstall and reinstall a billion things each time it updates!

 

Might and Magic X: it's a gift from the time when there was still time!

I really like it: the pace is very nice and quiet, and that's precisely what I want after a long day at work: relaxed, turnbased, engaging fun.

 

I've not tried the official, full release but the early access was offensively awful.

 

M&MX has quite a few people really pissed off on the Steam forums. The biggest complaint is the lack of any respawning monsters to use to grind your party to obscene levels.

But the game is modable, so I expect time and a few fans will fix that issue.

 

Sure, if you've got $1.5k for the software to mod it.

 

Hmmm. I must have missed this part. Did they falsely claim it was capable of being modded by the players when no-one would have the capacity to do it without shelling out a fortune? I will have to look into this. Thanks Loerwyn.

 

It seems there are two sides to this. Loerwyn is correct. You must shell out $1500 for a copy of Unity Pro to make real mods, but if you just mean to edit existing things, it is mostly XML and can be done without buying anything.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/238750/discussions/0/558746089376651319/

 

I might make a few xml changes for my second run, could be fun . I have no idea why people would think it was awful and frankly I am at a point in the development cycle for our game that I don't even want to know, as I just want to walk around and do stuff. It's really the ideal game for me now. No respawning monsters is good. I wouldn't want it differently.
It's just fun and you can be as slow as you want... bliss

 

You didn't play the Early Access. It was not good.

 

For those of you interested in Starsector... (Formerly known as Starfarer.)

The mods are pretty good. If you go here and scroll down a bit, you will see a whole bunch of Let's Play type videos of the game with the mod set that this thread refers to.
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6053.0

And as MOOMANiBE said, David did the art for it. (Yes, the same David that did insane amounts of insane art for DoD and Clockwork Empires.)

Show them some love. The game really is good, and cheap too. ($10 USD.) This spam brought to you by an insane person on this forum.

Let us know if and when you decide to go for Steam Greenlight. I and others will gladly vote for it.

 

$12.50 for me... because they add on VAT.

 

Ah. Thank you for the correction. I never understood how VAT worked anyway. And the words "Value Added Tax" seems like saying something to the effect of "comfortable theft of your money for no benefit to you".

 

It's sales tax.

 

Yeah. I know. The problem I have is that they dress it up with a name that implies it is a good thing. Sales taxes exist in almost all the world. But most people cannot name a single benefit they derive as a result of paying them.

If they called it "Feeding the Bureaucracy Tax" I would laugh and applaud the honesty of it.

 

Bringing politics into this is dangerous... but... if people can't name a single benefit they get from paying sales taxes, it doesn't mean those taxes are not "a good thing", or that they exist solely to feed a pointless bureaucracy that does nothing for the tax-payers. I've never looked up the specs on the VAT (because I don't live in Europe) but here in the States sales taxes directly fund a ton of benefits for John Q Public.

Police and Fire Department, for starters. In much of the US, their wages and operating budgets come largely from State and Local sales taxes. When emergency services respond to a problem, it's at least partially because sales tax provides them with the resources to do so.

Exactly what gets its funding from sales tax (as opposed to income tax, or property tax, or lottery, or ballot levy, etc) is going to vary considerably from one jurisdiction to another, but chances are very high that a significant portion of that money goes to programs and services you use all the time. Road repairs. Metro buses. Street signs. Snow plows. Public schools. Universities. State hospitals.

 

I find the UK system a lot easier to deal with than the US one, because - AFAIK - prices are without tax added on, yes? In the UK prices are *with* tax, so you don't need to worry about it because it's worked out for you.

 

Good point r_b_bergstrom. I never meant to imply there were no benefits. In fact, I only dislike the name.

And a good point about the mathematics being done in advance Loerwyn.

Now I will attempt to abort this de-rail before I sink a rather long and enjoyable thread. This is post #1321 in this thread, I hope I do not offend our hosts with my insanity. (Again...)