![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther1. I'm still playing Invisible, Inc, which is now my most-played Steam game with 289 hours on record. I'm currently trying to get the achievement for finishing the story mode on Expert with the rewind function (which lets you take back a turn that goes badly) switched off. That's been a struggle, because I'm the kind of player who thinks it's boring to carefully think through every possible consequence of a move before making it, and so at least once per game I do something ill-advised that lands me in a heap of trouble that makes me wish I still had the rewind function. I'm getting better at thinking my way out of trouble, though.
(And I now have a save slot devoted to preserving the time I almost got the achievement: If you could load it up, you'd see it's the final mission, and all the agents are gathered around the final macguffin, though one of them's unconscious and only made it because one of his colleagues dragged his body halfway across the level, dodging guards the whole time. All that needs to be done to finish the game is switch on the macguffin. The catch is there's only one agent who has the ability to switch on the macguffin, and it's Mr Unconscious. The game apparently hasn't been programmed to recognise this as an unwinnable state, and the final mission can only be ended by winning or by everybody dying, and I refuse to send the rest of the agents out to get killed just to resolve the stand-off, so I guess they're just going to be holed up in that office forever...)
2. My next-most-played Steam game is Star Realms, with 219 hours on record. (After that there's a steep drop of nearly 140 hours to the next on the list.) Star Realms is the electronic edition of a deck-building card game that I've only played once in real life. Players each have their own separate deck representing spaceships and starbases, with various abilities to attack, defend, or trade for better spaceships and starbases to add to the deck. The games are short and the basic concept simple enough that I often fire it up when I have a few minutes to kill -- and then I usually lose, because the strategy is deep enough that I can't reliably win unless I'm really paying attention and not just looking for distraction.
3. Much further down the list, but climbing with some rapidity, is Armello. It's an interesting game; I got it in a Board Game Bundle and it's designed like the electronic edition of a real board game, complete with movement hexes and simulated dice pools and skill cards, but as far as I know it was created as a computer game first and there's never been a physical edition. I'm not sure there could be; there are a lot of stats and random events that the computer is keeping track of in the background that somebody would have to be juggling in a physical game.
The aim of the game is to overthrow the corrupt king holed up in the fortress at the centre of the board -- which keeps throwing me, because that seems to me like a premise for a co-operative game, and the box art shows the player characters standing in a group surrounded by perils, but in fact it's a fully competitive game; the aim is not just to be rid of the old king but to make sure that one's own character is chosen as his successor. I still find it weirdly disconcerting every time another player acts in a particularly looking-out-for-number-one way, or every time I'm reminded that there's just no mechanism for giving other characters a hand even when they're nominally from the same clan as one's own character. And I don't know if it's because of that, or something else, but I find myself skimming over most of the flavour text in the game, picking out the bits that affect the game mechanics but not interested in the story it's trying to tell. But I'm finding the game mechanics interesting enough that I keep coming back to it.
4. I saw videos of people playing Apex Legends and thought it might be fun to try, and "free" is a difficult price to argue with, so I downloaded a copy. Unfortunately, it turns out my computer doesn't have the graphical power to run it properly. (It's not a new computer, and also I deliberately went with the cheap option for the graphics card specifically because I don't usually play this kind of game.) The first bad sign was when it couldn't even play the title graphic without stopping to think about it. Then it struggled all the way through the tutorial even with all the graphics settings dialled way down; after I turned the graphics settings down even further the tutorial ran all right but then I tried the game proper and it crashed. So I think I'm going to have to let it pass.
(And I now have a save slot devoted to preserving the time I almost got the achievement: If you could load it up, you'd see it's the final mission, and all the agents are gathered around the final macguffin, though one of them's unconscious and only made it because one of his colleagues dragged his body halfway across the level, dodging guards the whole time. All that needs to be done to finish the game is switch on the macguffin. The catch is there's only one agent who has the ability to switch on the macguffin, and it's Mr Unconscious. The game apparently hasn't been programmed to recognise this as an unwinnable state, and the final mission can only be ended by winning or by everybody dying, and I refuse to send the rest of the agents out to get killed just to resolve the stand-off, so I guess they're just going to be holed up in that office forever...)
2. My next-most-played Steam game is Star Realms, with 219 hours on record. (After that there's a steep drop of nearly 140 hours to the next on the list.) Star Realms is the electronic edition of a deck-building card game that I've only played once in real life. Players each have their own separate deck representing spaceships and starbases, with various abilities to attack, defend, or trade for better spaceships and starbases to add to the deck. The games are short and the basic concept simple enough that I often fire it up when I have a few minutes to kill -- and then I usually lose, because the strategy is deep enough that I can't reliably win unless I'm really paying attention and not just looking for distraction.
3. Much further down the list, but climbing with some rapidity, is Armello. It's an interesting game; I got it in a Board Game Bundle and it's designed like the electronic edition of a real board game, complete with movement hexes and simulated dice pools and skill cards, but as far as I know it was created as a computer game first and there's never been a physical edition. I'm not sure there could be; there are a lot of stats and random events that the computer is keeping track of in the background that somebody would have to be juggling in a physical game.
The aim of the game is to overthrow the corrupt king holed up in the fortress at the centre of the board -- which keeps throwing me, because that seems to me like a premise for a co-operative game, and the box art shows the player characters standing in a group surrounded by perils, but in fact it's a fully competitive game; the aim is not just to be rid of the old king but to make sure that one's own character is chosen as his successor. I still find it weirdly disconcerting every time another player acts in a particularly looking-out-for-number-one way, or every time I'm reminded that there's just no mechanism for giving other characters a hand even when they're nominally from the same clan as one's own character. And I don't know if it's because of that, or something else, but I find myself skimming over most of the flavour text in the game, picking out the bits that affect the game mechanics but not interested in the story it's trying to tell. But I'm finding the game mechanics interesting enough that I keep coming back to it.
4. I saw videos of people playing Apex Legends and thought it might be fun to try, and "free" is a difficult price to argue with, so I downloaded a copy. Unfortunately, it turns out my computer doesn't have the graphical power to run it properly. (It's not a new computer, and also I deliberately went with the cheap option for the graphics card specifically because I don't usually play this kind of game.) The first bad sign was when it couldn't even play the title graphic without stopping to think about it. Then it struggled all the way through the tutorial even with all the graphics settings dialled way down; after I turned the graphics settings down even further the tutorial ran all right but then I tried the game proper and it crashed. So I think I'm going to have to let it pass.
