Skua

“The enemy has captured a command post”

If you want pausable combat and a logistics focus, the Hearts of Iron games might be interesting to you. They’re pseudo-real-time in that things happen on an counter that ticks forward once per in-game hour of the day (so the results of two units fighting, a diplomatic message being sent, construction on a building), but you can speed up, slow down, or pause however you wish. If you want to zip along at a few seconds of real time per day in game, cool. Want to slow things down to a few seconds per in game hour instead? Also fine. Need to pause while you read a description? Also fine.

Seconding Space Marine 2. It’s built for three-player co-op, crossplay works smoothly, and it’s a super satisfying shooter

Seven hundred million dollars

Paradox’s games don’t really do storytelling in a traditional sense. They’re strategy and management games. Some of them are pretty damn good at creating stories dynamically through gameplay, or providing a frame upon which you can create your own stories, but they were never intended to be narrative experiences

Presumably you downloaded Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), which I still had to do to make a custom keyboard layout in 2022. Funnily enough I was also wanting to use AltGr to add diacritics to vowels, because I don’t want to have to go to the backtick key for àèìòù

For what it’s worth, making a custom layout actually is a huge pain in the arse. That’s a pretty niche use case, but there is definitely no reason for it to be as much of a hassle as it is

It is technically spoilers for Outer Wilds and also the DLC

Ahh fuck, stuff being published by them was usually a decent sign that it’d be interesting in some way. Best of luck to the actual team, I hope they can put something new together

Each to their own! I really enjoyed V and have hundreds of hours in it, but I appreciated the changes in VI and felt like it vbecame a stronger game than V overall. I do have more hours in VI. I get that the art style was a little controversial, but I was never playing V for the visuals anyway

Districts were a thing in Civ 6, before Humankind came out

For Civ 6, I’d say winning each victory once. Try to do it with different civs each time too. You can set your goal as winning a game on the highest difficulty if you want, but personally I don’t find that to be as interesting as the shift in gameplay necessary to win the different victories without just militarily crushing everyone else.

I really wanted to love ESO, and I’m delighted that they’e actually using the weirder lore sometimes, but it never felt like it rewarded my exploration. Like I never learned aything new about a place by finding stuff in it.

Hah, well maybe I pre-judged it too much. I’ll keep an eye out for a sale on it

I was actually slightly put off by how tightly it looked like it was imitating the first couple of Wipeout games, like the UI being almost identical and a bunch of the teams being the Wipeout ones with the serial numbers filed off. Like they’re unwilling to try their own ideas, you know? If it’s so similar, well I can still play the old games. I assume you feel differently?

…well I feel really bad about downvoting this one, because it’s a really good suggestion

Wipeout. They can continue from Omega, it was great fun. Formula Fusion is a really cool spiritual successor by many of the original minds, but it’s a little lacking in content.

Edit: lol, took me four hours to realise that continuing on after Omega rather ruins the title of that one

Games I enjoyed playing with my then-gilfriend:

• Castle Crashers. 2.5D side scrolling action
• Skyrim Together, although this requires at least one of you to have a decent level of understanding to get things to work smoothly
• ibb & obb, puzzle
• Portal 2, puzzle
• Shadow Puppeteer, puzzle

Fair enough on Elden Ring actually, I looked up the sales numbers and it did do very well for any videogame rather than “just” very well for a FromSoft game as I had thought

I don’t think that should be terribly surprising. Both those games are targeted at specific niches. They were notably successful for gaining popularity beyond their niches, but they were still niche products. Elden Ring is still incredibly obtuse and will fucking murder you out the gates and just expect you to pick yourself up and try again. BG3 is a D&D game that expects you to know the tabletop version to a degree. Both are awesome, but they’re aimed at narrower markets