What Was The Last Game You Played?

[BFTD]

10 hours ago, Theroadlesstravelled said:

Simulation games. Hours of laborious and time consuming fun, bitch.

Riot Control Simulator, Chernobyl Liquidators Simulator, Winery Simulator, PC Building Simulator. What's your favourite? 

Farming Simulator and Car Mechanic Simulator are the nuts. 

Holy shit, that's real  

It's probably worth starting a Dad Games thread - there are so many games that simulate jobs for middle-aged men to play when they're not at work doing their own jobs. It's funny considering the genre started as a joke, but loads of people genuinely thought "actually, I've always wondered what it would be like to run the machinery at an aglet factory".

I've occasionally dipped into House Flipper, and I can see why people like Viscera Cleanup Detail, although I always get that "why didn't I just clean up in the real world?" feeling after playing it.

[Theroadlesstravelled]

The classic Advanced Lawn Mower Simulator on the Speccy started it maybe. There was one button like 'M to mow' and you couldn't do anything else.

There's almost too many to play now but I'll give it a good try.

Gas Station Simulator
Rating: 9/10 · ‎16,036 reviews

[BFTD]

7 minutes ago, Theroadlesstravelled said:

The classic Advanced Lawn Mower Simulator on the Speccy started it maybe. There was one button like 'M to mow' and you couldn't do anything else.

There's almost too many to play now but I'll give it a good try.

Gas Station Simulator
Rating: 9/10 · ‎16,036 reviews

Bit OT, but Advanced Lawnmower Simulator was made by fondly-remembered writer Duncan MacDonald as a joke for a Your Sinclair covertape, and spawned a whole weird micro-genre of deliberately shit lawnmowing games. He went on to write the Mr Cursor column in PC Zone magazine in the Nineties (and also Your Sinclair's 16-bit spiritual successor, Zero).

I mention it because he died a few years ago, and some of the Spec-chums on here (@Melanius Mullarkay) might be unaware, as apparently he'd been ill for a long time and hadn't worked in a while. I certainly don't recall seeing his name anywhere post-PC Zone, while some of his old colleagues like Charlie Brooker and, erm, Stuart Campbell still turn up in different "projects". I always remember him for positing that Hank Williams played the guitar like a man who'd just picked one up for the first time, which was something that hadn't occurred to me but is undeniably true.

[HarleyQuinn]

Just played Killer Frequency. 9/10. I really enjoyed it. Highly recommend.

"Killer Frequency is a first-person horror puzzle game set in 1987, that puts you in the role of a late-night radio talk show host in small town America whose callers are being stalked by a mysterious killer. All Reviews: Very Positive (397) - 95% of the 397 user reviews for this game are positive."

 

 

[SweeperDee]

Crusader Kings 3:

 

Restoring natural order

 

 

[Boo Khaki]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/Vagrus__The_Riven_Realms/

This. Really interesting game. It's heavy on text to give it flavour, but the trading and Comitatus management parts are really absorbing. 

It seems to be virtually unknown as the Reddit is totally dead having seen about 2 posts in the past 3 months, but it's hard to understand why because it really is a great wee game. I picked it up for not much more than a tenner on Epic but it's easy to get it running in Steam if you do that. It's a small team and I don't think the game has really been marketed much, hence why it's gone unnoticed, but it's not because it isn't an interesting title. I think the 'extremely unforgiving' warnings might have put a lot of people off, but there is free saving available so even if you screw up it's easy to recover your playthrough. It is punishing on mistakes and it's easy to die out in the desert at first, but I love the challenge in these types of games so it's right up my street, and once you get to grips with the basics it's not too difficult to slowly expand and consolidate. It's not a game for people just looking for a quick hit and immediate return, but if you like slower progression you have to work for then it'll probably scratch that itch for a while.

[accies1874]

On 14/06/2023 at 10:15, HarleyQuinn said:

Just played Killer Frequency. 9/10. I really enjoyed it. Highly recommend.

"Killer Frequency is a first-person horror puzzle game set in 1987, that puts you in the role of a late-night radio talk show host in small town America whose callers are being stalked by a mysterious killer. All Reviews: Very Positive (397) - 95% of the 397 user reviews for this game are positive."

 

 

This sounds really fun but is it worth it for £20?

[RuMoore]

Humanity - the game makes me feel very stupid and then when I figure out the puzzle I'm a genius. 

On the ps plus game library, class if you're just looking for something light. 

Edited June 15, 2023 by RuMoore

[The DA]

On 07/06/2023 at 03:42, Theroadlesstravelled said:

Simulation games. Hours of laborious and time consuming fun, bitch.

Riot Control Simulator, Chernobyl Liquidators Simulator, Winery Simulator, PC Building Simulator. What's your favourite? 

 

Farming Simulator and Car Mechanic Simulator are the nuts. 

Powerwash Simulator for me.  Suits my ADHD tendencies.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Project Cars 2 (PS4, 2017)

Project Cars 2 is... well, it's a racing game. You drive cars round tracks in races against other cars.

I don't like writing about games by comparing them to others, but after finishing the first Project Cars last year and more or less jumping straight into this it seems worth doing. Even if you reading this right now have no idea what I thought about the first game. Luckily, I can be even more succinct than in my opening. I liked Project Cars, and Project Cars 2 is Project Cars but a bit better in pretty much every way.

The career structure in the first game didn't make any sense and was very awkward to navigate even when you worked it out. Here, you start off in one of three starter-level classes and complete one season of them. When the new season starts you pick a new championship to compete in. There are six tiers of championships you can progress through, of varying lengths and of increasingly sophisticated or high profile cars/series. In addition to these championships there are Manufacturer Drives, with four stand-alone races each for different manufacturers which you can unlock and participate in whenever you want. There are also Invitational Events, split into five categories offering an even greater range of individual races. You can compete in these whenever you want. The career makes full use of all the game's content, which is a massive improvement on the first game.

I finished Assetto Corsa last year and I think I forgot to write it up. This was in part because I didn't really have anything in-depth to say, but I enjoyed PCars 2 for mostly the same reasons. I just enjoyed the physical act of driving. I play with a wheel and pedals and an extremely rudimentary knowledge of the things that affect race cars, and after 150 hours I'm not bored with the game. I don't feel the same sense of completion I do with most games after I've earned the platinum. I could go back to playing this semi-regularly and just be content with it. I could start the game again from the beginning, working my way through and enjoy it just as much. Maybe even more if I decided to make the races longer. It's rare for me to experience this in a game these days, so I think it deserves credit for this. 

Each circuit in the game has fully dynamic 24 hour time changes and changeable weather, with everything from bright sunlight to snow and fog and storms and track conditions which change accordingly. Like the first game the graphical quality of the cars can vary, but the environment and lighting effects are genuinely spectacular. I think Gran Turismo 5 is the high point for me in terms of actually feeling immersed in time and weather changes, but there's a chance that's because it's the first game where I experienced it. Here though, it always just looks great. The shift from sunset into night is practically worth seeing at every track, just to experience it as much as you can.

Similarly, the weather and track conditions changing feel mostly natural and obvious. Dry and wet lines appear accordingly as a track dries or gets wet. Track temperatures play a role in your car and tyre performance (and other mechanical things), and all of this combines to make the conditions as much of a challenge as your car or the cars you're racing against. 

I said mostly up there because of the problems I had with cars aquaplaning when they hit puddles. I remember watching F1 in the early 2000s. I remember Martin Brundle explaining that aquaplaning happens when there's too much water on the track surface for the tyres to touch it and grip, so your car just skids because the wheels spin and there's no traction. In PCars2, if you hit a puddle you feel as if one of your wheels has fallen off. There's no way to describe this other than to say no matter the car, no matter the speed, tyre, anything - if you hit a visibly wet spot on the track your car will pitch and lurch to the side. This eventually makes certain conditions practically undriveable, and it was wildly annoying. It was especially annoying when it didn't seem to affect the AI, but this is a problem I'll go into in more detail later. I'll happily admit I don't drive and don't know how realistic this is, but it doesn't feel right.

PCars 2 is much closer to the simulation side of the racing game spectrum than the arcade side. In addition to the weather and time changes, the level of technical detail in the cars is huge. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about cars, or know anything about the many decades of road and race cars covered here, but you can tune near enough every aspect of a car's performance. There's also a simplified Race Engineer option where you can tell it which parts of the car you're struggling with and it makes suggestions to change the downforce or suspension settings for example, but in my experience this is overly simplistic and doesn't really make much of a difference. As an example, when running an Audi R18 at Le Mans the custom setup I used from the internet made a difference of about ten seconds a lap, and there's no way I could have done that using the game's options. 

Back in my Gran Turismo 4 days I remember obsessively tinkering with the tuning of the cars I was driving. That was obviously massively simplified compared to now, but even then I just don't think I have the time or inclination for it anymore. I think this is one of sim-racing's biggest obstacles. Any one of the race cars you drive in this game could have hundreds of people involved in its design, construction and maintenance. In a game, the player is effectively given all of the options, a few lines of description for what they do and is left to get on with it. The base setups are largely manageable, but the difference when you use one from someone who knows what they're doing makes it feel like a different car. In my limited experience the sense of community is one of the best parts of sim-racing, but the massive time investment it can be never really stops being daunting.

Fortunately, if you don't feel like a crash course (ahem) in engineering before every race, there are sliders to change the AI difficulty and aggression levels. I think I got better at the game the longer I played it, because I found myself able to turn the difficulty up as I progressed through the career. This made me feel quite smug, I'll be honest. One problem here though is how this can vary depending on what or where you're driving. Road America? The AI goes through corners at a pace I just can't. Circuit of the Americas? I don't know how the esses at the start of the lap work but when I try and take them flat I go off road, when I slow down I get punted. The same goes for the rain too. One of the Porsche events has 70s classics racing at the old Hockenheim layout and it's simply physically impossible to drive through the rain at the same rate the AI does. I remember setting the difficulty to 30 (out of 110) and still getting left behind. After the amount of time I spent with the game I largely had a feel for what settings I needed to use to get a good race, but this really seems like one of the game's biggest weaknesses.

One other thing to mention here about the career mode is being able to change the length of races. If you just want to blast through as quickly as possible, go to minimum length and everything will be 3 laps or 20 minutes. By the time you reach the final tier of championships you'll be doing 24 hour races, or 90 laps of Long Beach in Indycar. Really, the game can be as engaging and realistic as you want it to be. You can also pit in and switch for an AI driver if you need a break in one of those endurance races, and if anything this is even more tense. I used it a few times and again I was back to watching B-Spec Bob in  Gran Turismo 4 and 5, willing him round. It's a bit detached, but you still will the car round every corner. He only hits the other cars sometimes.

One of the original Project Cars' biggest failings was the collision physics. Touch another car? You're now glued together and going off track, sorry. This has been changed in Project Cars 2, but sadly the main reason I know this is the AI's fondness for terrible driving. I wasn't on a high difficulty, I wasn't on max aggression, but the AI seemed to love doing things that would get a driver banned for life on pretty much every lap. The amount of moving under braking into a corner, throwing cars into a gap at a corner that's never going to exist, it was honestly remarkable to see. The moving into corners always got me though. I don't know what the inspiration was for this driving style, but I suppose at least if you hit one of them they'd just go off, rather than taking you off with them.

The best example of this in my experience was found in IndyCar racing. There's a trophy for driving a full distance, 200 lap race at Indianapolis. The Indy 500. One of the world's most famous races, and with properly licenced teams and drivers the Indy championship is actually great fun once you're far enough through the career to play it. Rather than just turn the difficulty down and coast I decided to try and do the race properly, with a semblance of competition. I'd say it was almost worth the aggravation. Frantically following a leading car to get slipstream and keep your speed up and your fuel consumption down? Well he'll start braking for the pitlane with no warning before he's out of the last corner, so you're going into the back of him and your race is over after 140 laps. Or maybe there's been a crash and all of the AI cars are travelling at 60mph to go around it and by the time you've caught up it's too late to brake and you're out. Or maybe you're side by side going round a corner and the AI will just veer into the side of you and you're into the wall and upside down and two of your wheels have fallen off.

I spent so long trying to do that race I actually developed a fondness for oval racing. The level of concentration and precision required is exactly the sort of joy of driving I mentioned at the start of this review. With the variable AI quality this was one of the most challenging parts of the whole game for me. It's just that most of that challenge was trying to anticipate completely unnatural movements.

One addition to the game from last time was off-road racing, specifically rallycross and ice driving. There are several contemporary World Rallycross cars and tracks in the game. I can't really drive off-road in games on my setup so I can't comment with certainty, but as far as I can tell it's all a complete waste of time. I've played plenty of rally games with a controller and been fine. Wheel or gamepad though, you just can't in PCars 2. There's no grip, you can't slide, there's just... nothing. You can imagine what it's like trying to race the AI I've just described when you can barely move your own car. I don't understand why a pretty substantial amount of content exists when it feels this laboured to play. 

Slightly related to this, while the Manufacturer and Invitational events are great career additions, some of them can feel as redundant as the off-road stuff. There's one in the Supercar menu which takes place at the short layout of the Red Bull Ring at worst a lap under a minute. You're in supercars and hypercars - Paganis, McLarens, basically the fastest road cars that are in the game. Conditions are always the same. The race starts early in the morning in the fog, so it's cold. There's not much track temperature, so there's not much grip. Fine. As the race progresses it starts raining. Eventually the track temperature is 33 degrees Fahrenheit or 1 Celsius. The event was so stupid I actually had to convert the temperature and find out how cold it was. The track surface is basically ice, and you're trying to drive a short lap in a car that slides around even if you're in 6th gear. Things like this and the off-road stuff just make me wonder - who designed this event? Who approved it and put it in the game? How could anyone think it was a good idea? Why bother?

I played the game with all the DLC so I'm not sure off-hand what was base content and what wasn't, but I know some of my favourite parts were extra. Driving the classic Le Mans and Spa layouts in Porsches, Ferraris and Fords from the 60s and 70s was absolutely as terrifying as it should be. I think I remember watching a Jimmy Broadbent video about this long ago that made me buy the game in the first place, the experience holds up. 

I think even if you're using a controller, even if you don't know anything about cars or motor racing you can find joy in combinations like this. I think even with the various problems I've described the game hits the right mix of depth and accessibility, with an appeal to people who've never played a racing game in their life or people like me who by now have spent decades with them. There are still things I would improve, but it was still 150 hours well spent.

[Mr. Brightside]

I personally thought Project Cars 2 was way worse than the original. Admittedly I didn't give it much time, but the kart races at the start bored me to tears, then the races in actual cars felt horrible. Every car felt like it understeered at every available moment.

[Miguel Sanchez]

15 hours ago, Mr. Brightside said:

I personally thought Project Cars 2 was way worse than the original. Admittedly I didn't give it much time, but the kart races at the start bored me to tears, then the races in actual cars felt horrible. Every car felt like it understeered at every available moment.

It's definitely not something that's well suited for a controller. I did one season of karts (there's a lot less of it in 2 than 1) and never touched them again. Come to think of it I did the online trophies with a controller and if anything the cars (Ginetta GT5 level, so not fast) were extremely twitchy.

[Boo Khaki]

I like Assetto Corsa Competizione for my racing fix. The physics are much improved over the original game. I still play GTR II/GTR Evo/Race 07 as well, because despite being prehistoric it's one of the few driving sims where the setup changes actually do what they do in real life, so if something is not right it's usually easy enough to diagnose and correct, and you can make small tweaks to Diff etc just to suit how you personally prefer to approach certain tracks. Rfactor is decent as well, it's creaky as hell nowadays but I still play it for the WSC 1970 mod and stuff.

[Miguel Sanchez]

2 hours ago, Boo Khaki said:

I like Assetto Corsa Competizione for my racing fix. The physics are much improved over the original game. I still play GTR II/GTR Evo/Race 07 as well, because despite being prehistoric it's one of the few driving sims where the setup changes actually do what they do in real life, so if something is not right it's usually easy enough to diagnose and correct, and you can make small tweaks to Diff etc just to suit how you personally prefer to approach certain tracks. Rfactor is decent as well, it's creaky as hell nowadays but I still play it for the WSC 1970 mod and stuff.

I take it you play ACC on PC? Now I've finished PC2 I'm going to the PS4 version of ACC to finish that. I think I can handle the framerate.

[Boo Khaki]

Yeah PC. You can pick up ACC for about a fiver now.

[Gianfranco]

I’ve been playing Hitman Absolution for a bit of nostalgia recently. Might do a replay of the newer ones next. 

[Miguel Sanchez]

WRC 8  (PS4, 2019)

Last year I spent six months playing WRC 7. I didn't write it up for two reasons. The first is that I finished everything the game had to offer after around 200 stages. The following 800 I drove were to finish all the in-game accomplishments for the trophies. By the time I was done after driving the same stage 800 times I never wanted to think about it again. The other reason is that, hideous compulsion towards completionism aside, there wasn't really much to write about. I don't have that much to say about WRC 8 either, but I enjoyed every aspect of it a lot more than 7, so I want to tell you anyway.

WRC 8 is the official game of the 2019 World Rally Championship season. For some reason the older WRC games get reduced to very cheap prices when there are sales on the PS Store nowadays. I definitely approve. Rallying is something I've always enjoyed more in video game format than the televised competition itself, but on a week by week basis I can feel my interest in Formula 1 drifting, so I might need something new to fill that motorsport void. Either way, the fact this is a seasons old game doesn't matter because it's still fantastic to drive.

Career mode feels properly involving, if a little sterile. You start out picking a team to drive for at Junior WRC level. You don't just drive though, you're your own team manager too. Competing in rallies and optional events unlocks points you can spend improving your R&D department. It earns you money to pay for your repairs and hire new staff members, like a better mechanic to perform repairs faster or a better agent to have a better range of events to take part in. From Junior level up through WRC 2, WRC 2 Pro and eventually full WRC the career expansion definitely enhances the experience. 

The sterile aspect comes from a lack of an actual human interface. I've just realised the voice of the tutorial woman telling you what each part of the menu does is the only human communication all game. The rest of your team's headquarters is seen through a top down view that looks like a slightly more boring version of The Sims. Even after several seasons there are parts of the Crew I never understood. You can hire a Meteorologist to tell you weather forecasts. You can unlock upgrades so you can see the full three parts of a forecast for each stage you drive. Can't you just check the weather on the internet? Like the other Crew members they can be tired and need time to rest after rallies, why? They're looking at a screen and telling you what they see. Maybe they're holding their hand out of the window to see if it's raining. Ultimately it's all a waste of time anyway, because I'm pretty sure at least 80% of every forecast ever made was wrong. Not even a little bit wrong, I'm talking Biblical storms when it was apparently 0% chance of rain.

While the game's faults become more apparent the more time you spend with it, they're only ever minor inconveniences, and things which only stand out after spending several seasons with the Career mode. The driving itself does more than enough to make up for it. I played with a gamepad and every class of car is the perfect blend of intuitively controllable yet ferocious, barely tameable beast. Moving up through the classes I had to really adjust from front wheel drive to four wheel drive, properly adapting the way I approached each stage. After spending a bit of time grinding mileage out on one stage at the end of my time with the game you can really see how you can push the limits. As with real rallying (or any motorsport I suppose) there's a fine line, a limit you can push to and then the inevitable punishment when you go a bit too far. If I ever get around to writing a review of Dirt Rally 2 there will be screeds of me telling you how much I hate the co-driver, Phil Mills, but here all the actual rallying details are perfect.

The game looks and sounds great too. Visually it does the big and the small things well. Seeing the weather turn over the course of a stage is dramatic and almost makes up for the terrible crew member who didn't warn you of it. Night stages are as terrifying as they should be. Even small details like having to turn your wipers on every now and then because of dust even in the dry just makes it feel like the struggle against the elements it should. The cars all sound great to me, and even the sound of the weather and the brief flashes of cheering crowds as you blast through a forest add life to the game and make it all an experience. 

The biggest criticism I have is probably a symptom of playing six seasons through the various categories back to back. The fourteen locations of the WRC are here. At WRC level a rally consists of six stages. The actual choice of stages per location isn't very large though, so it can get repetitive quickly. You might have Stage A, Stage B, Stage A and B combined, Stage B reverse, a shorter closed circuit SSS then Stage A and B combined reverse. I think some locations have more options than others, and I understand why this limitation exists, but the lack of variety is really apparent at times. Each location brings extremely unique challenges which is good, you might just tune it out a bit as you're doing it.

I ended up saying more than I was expecting. I think I just wanted to complain about the weather forecasts. If you're looking at sales and fancy a bit of off-roading, this is an extremely good place to start.

[accies1874]

On 14/06/2023 at 10:15, HarleyQuinn said:

Just played Killer Frequency. 9/10. I really enjoyed it. Highly recommend.

"Killer Frequency is a first-person horror puzzle game set in 1987, that puts you in the role of a late-night radio talk show host in small town America whose callers are being stalked by a mysterious killer. All Reviews: Very Positive (397) - 95% of the 397 user reviews for this game are positive."

 

 

I played this last weekend and agree with the recommendation. Obviously a really simple game that's essentially just about making choices, but I loved the campy, small-town slasher vibe confined to a radio station which is probably closer to what I was hoping for from Until Dawn and The Quarry (the former is great but I prefer slashers to supernatural stuff so this was up my street). A couple of the deaths were a bit unfair - and a couple were sheer stupidity on my part - and the controls were a bit finnicky on a controller, but it's an enjoyable way to spend a few hours (just over 4 for me) and I reckon I'll go through it again. 

[Boo Khaki]

Torn between purchasing Elden Ring (now that I built a PC that can handle it no bother), Last Epoch, or Dave the Diver

I know the obvious solution is 'buy all three', but I have an issue with becoming totally and utterly invested in one title at a time, it's autistic 'special interest', so there is literally no point in me buying three titles because two will go uninstalled for months. 

I have about 4 TB of storage on my PC, yet I only have a selection of games installed that I play on loop. Project Zomboid, Path of Exile, Football Manager, Wartales, Starsector, Grim Dawn, ACC. I tend to play one title for about six weeks solid and don't even look at anything else, then onto the next one, and around it goes until I'm back on the first. At the moment, because I don't have a fixation I'm just sitting twiddling my thumbs, can't decide what to buy, and have no interest in booting any of the titles I own.

Any other ASD gamers on P&B like this?

[RuMoore]

3 hours ago, Boo Khaki said:

Torn between purchasing Elden Ring (now that I built a PC that can handle it no bother), Last Epoch, or Dave the Diver

I know the obvious solution is 'buy all three', but I have an issue with becoming totally and utterly invested in one title at a time, it's autistic 'special interest', so there is literally no point in me buying three titles because two will go uninstalled for months. 

I have about 4 TB of storage on my PC, yet I only have a selection of games installed that I play on loop. Project Zomboid, Path of Exile, Football Manager, Wartales, Starsector, Grim Dawn, ACC. I tend to play one title for about six weeks solid and don't even look at anything else, then onto the next one, and around it goes until I'm back on the first. At the moment, because I don't have a fixation I'm just sitting twiddling my thumbs, can't decide what to buy, and have no interest in booting any of the titles I own.

Any other ASD gamers on P&B like this?

I'm not ASD but I quite often get keen for a new game, download it and then don't play it for ages. 

I know that I'll enjoy the game but I don't wanna commit to it and then when I eventually do I always think why the f**k didn't I play that straight away. Kinda similar to how I couldn't be arsed to watch a 3 hours film on Netflix but I'd happily watch 5 hours of shite on YouTube. I'll play Fifa, F1, Fall guys half the day even though I wanna play something with substance I just overthink it and don't bother.