I’m fighting my OCD on it: I want this nice, neat layout and that doesn’t work in the game. I’ve seen pics of immense colonies that are wonderful patterns with the largest domes in the center ringed by smaller domes and such, but in practice you have ugly messes of piles and cables connecting domes.
It’s one reason I skip a lot of ‘builder’ games to be honest. I get too into the “Let’s make an optimized mass of stuff” even though I know that’s highly unrealistic.
On the other hand, I’m getting caught up on The Expanse while playing, which does fit the looser style required.
Ark: Survival Evolved. A couple friends and I have a private server and we’re getting close to being able to tackle the endgame in about 10-15 more levels.
My daughter and I run one too and we just can’t get enough momentum to get there. You need to spend several hours at a time to get a good rhythm going. Even with a boosted server.
I ain’t got no time to spend taming a Trike for an hour.
We have 6x taming on ours. I tamed an Argentavis in a little over 20 min the other night because we also ain’t go time for that. I’m pleased with the acquisition. It’s got way more range and stamina than my Pteranodon. The latter is a bit faster but the trade off is worth it.
We tamed a Quetzal a couple weeks ago. That’s a two person job. We put a platform saddle on it and now we have a mobile resource platform. Gathering goes a lot quicker when you can just fly out to where a resource is, unload your dinos, mine said resource, load the dinos back up, and fly home. We’ll load up a couple of Ankylos and come back with an ungodly amount of metal. The industrial forge is a godsend here.
I’ve also been building up the base a lot. It’s oddly relaxing. Like Minecraft with better graphics. I had to mine so much stone.
One of our peeps is currently playing Destiny 2 so there’s only the two of us but we’re still making progress, even if we have to keep Eric’s dinos fed.
I finally got one to ‘activate’ and it really does mess with things. I think the Mysteries are broadly similar in ‘goal’ to the ‘End Game Crisis’ that come up in Stellaris: They’re an external chaos that forces players out of neat, clean boxes or stasis. In Stellaris, for example, some of them are galaxy-wide threats: the stereotypical robot invasion, or extra-dimensional beasties. They can and do wreck major parts of your game world and throw it into disarray.
Similar in Mars: The one I saw went from “Oh, I found a cool thing. Let’s poke it.” to “These things are destroying my colony by freezing it to death.” It turned into a surprisingly fun struggle to complete several research goals and built the counter-measures while dealing with my colony dying by inches.
The main thing is ‘winning’ felt like an accomplishment, albeit a small one. I am, in general, currently considering the value to me of ‘endless’ games and I’m finding they’re unsatisfactory as I need a feeling of accomplishment.
I don’t have a very powerful computer system, so I’m not able to play any of the newer games. I installed something called Frostpunk, but had to get my money refunded because I couldn’t get it to work.
I guess I’ll just start replaying Portal, Portal II, HalfLife 2 and all the expansions, etc. My girlfriend is getting frustrated with me watching YouTube videos all the time. She actually enjoys watching me play these games.
OO! Maybe I can get that newer laptop I put downstairs to run a new game. I guess I’ll find out later today. HOORAY! Something new to try!
If you keep an eye out, you can get a couple versions of Xbox for crazy cheap, especially the one that doesn’t come with an optical drive. AFAIK, you can still plug in a USB BluRay drive, though.
Those games are some of my favourites anyway. I have replayed them many times over. I bought the Oculus Quest at least partly because HalfLife Alyx will be a VR only game when it comes out in about 5 days time.
It is indeed, and it was glorious. I ripped and tore my way through the campaign on the normal difficulty last weekend, and I may do another run through on Ultra Violence or Nightmare just because I can, and also to hunt down the rest of the secrets I missed.
, even on the easiest difficulty level it’s way harder than DOOM 2016.