Best Of

An acquaintance of mine in the VA community, Kira Buckland, did the voice for 2B, so I've been looking forward to playing it for that reason. It's good to hear that it's also actually a good game. I had never heard of the project until it came out, and most of what I've heard since then is from Kira's new fans, so I don't know much about the actual game.

Imagine you are a person who likes fabulously complicated games, with tons of moving parts--some immediately explicable, others not well-understood for 30+ hours. Example: I send my peon to go convert that plot of land into a farm, and I get more food. I start a war in the 16th century... will my society ever recover? Who knows! I'll find out in a few centuries (10+ hours of play time).

Now, if you will, imagine this on a grand scale. An Antikythera mechanism of a game, with hundreds of moving pieces: resources, diplomacy, government, exploration, research, experimentation. It's super Civ.

That's Stellaris. It's fucking awesome.

Not a new game but I want to give a very proud shout-out to Icrontic's World of Warcraft guild for amazing progress into mythic-level raiding. I know it doesn't mean much to a non-WoW player but mythic raiding is the top of the top difficulty content and our guild of 22 people have practiced, worked hard, and improved VERY rapidly to the point where we are now starting to do the most difficult content the game has to offer, and winning. Even if you don't know anything about WoW, you know that millions of people play it, and there are tens of thousands of guilds (groups of players that work towards common goals). Our guild is one of the top 100 on our server, which is a huge accomplishment (currently 71 on Kel'Thuzad). On one of the most recent difficult bosses, we were the 2925th guild in the US to beat the fight; again out of tens of thousands. Only 66 other guilds on our server beat it. I'm so proud of this team; we used to be "middle-of-the-road" in terms of ability to do tough content but everybody has worked hard to improve their performance and it's working

May

I picked this up not knowing much more about it than, "This looks like fun".

I WAS RIGHT.

It's too bad this didn't get the attention it deserves. Combat is crazy good, the soundtrack is one of the best I've ever heard and the way music changes depending on where you are and what's happening is pretty brilliant. There's tons to do and pretty much every quest adds something to the background of the world in some way. Without giving too much detail, this game made me sympathize with the enemies in a way no other game I can think of has and led me to put some thought into sentience and how it might develop. The only complaint I would have is that the main story leaves some questions but even that is a bonus. I didn't realize it at the start but this game tells (at least) 3 different stories, each unlocked after the completion of the previous character's story and will contribute to the whole. I'm on the second story and it opens up a completely new set of quests and way to play the game. Can't wait to see where it goes.