I won on "piss boy" difficulty after I figured out the game, but on the next level "jester" son of a B* and there are 10 difficulty levels. Game is definitely challenging. I've had games last 5 minutes and games last 2 hours.

I found the PC version of Ticket to Ride a nice quick game time waster.

Thoroughly enjoying Talisman so far but the game is awfully long and I can't imagine playing a real-time co-op game for 2-3 hours but maybe there are rules/ways to make the game faster.

Kentucky Route 0 is an unbelievable story. Fantastic point-and-click adventure.

I keep missing sales for this. :(

I missed this post, but read a review today.. think I'll grab this tonight!

Maximum Pixelation - Door Kickers (PC) Review

100% agree. Also be sure to check out the interlude acts Limits & Demonstrations, The Entertainment, and Here and There Along the Echo


I picked it up in the winter sale after reading the RPS article calling it the Bestest Best Tactics of 2014. I haven't gotten around to trying it but a friend was playing it earlier this week and I'm still waiting to hear back on how he liked it.

Door Kickers sounds like the game I've been waiting for ever since Deadline in the early 2000s. Interested to try it out

This looks fantastic.

I love the top-down aspect of games like this. Hotline Miami, Monaco, etc.

Also seems to have a Gunpoint feel to it.

I played a ton of Rainbow 6 in college (hello guild!), so if someone wants to let me know if this game actually has that feel (albeit from a 2D perspective) that'd be cool.

Gents.. I'm going to buy it now and should get some time with it later tonight, definitely will tomorrow and over the weekend. :)

Never should have started playing door kickers.. lol.. similar to frozen synapse but it feels much more realistic since it's with police/swat with settings like apartments and what not. So far, there is no hey, it's the police, it's kick in the door and shoot first, ask questions later. Very tactical and you can pause or play real time or combo of both (which is what I do).

You can level up and get perks, different guns/equipment/etc

Enjoying so far!

The way I've been trying to play it has been to setup as much as possible with my initial pause strategy, retrying and tweaking as needed... I love that it remembers the strategy you set in the last try.

Me too.. it's quite addicting.. where I want to try just one more fail or go on to the next one, etc.. well done game!

Two games are free this weekend on Steam, Saints Row IV and Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Good time to check them out.

Thanks! Gives me a chance to check out Civ:BE. Already own and beat Saints Row, what a fun series.

Conquest of Elysium 3 is on sale for $2.49 this week.

They just patched it again too.. WELL WORTH it, especially for this price.

Any previews of how good/bad Cities XXXL might be? It's 50% off pre-order on Steam, and I got some decent mileage out of the previous version (but the first one was horrible)

Project Zomboid is pretty great as far as zombie survival games go. It's early access, but feels like a finished product - though missing non-zombie NPCs.

just bought it

It takes a little bit to get into and to get past the simple graphics.. but once you learn the basics, it's a fun little game.

yeah I agree, I think I'm starting to get used to it and figure out the strategy a bit.

Watch out for those deer.. :p

my army just drowned in a lake!

Someone's been trying to access my steam account. From Russia and China.

Welp, time to change passwords.

OMG.. same thing happened to me when I had a good size army built up.. I got that message, game over and I was like WTF? Stay away from those frozen lakes!

I heard this game was good. Anybody play it?

Save 50% on Ziggurat on Steam

As an aside, how many of you care about achievements in games? Do you compare them to achievements your friends have earned? How many achievements feels about right? Can there be achievement overload?

I don't care about achievments at all. It doesn't bother me if there are tons of them, some of them or none.

I don't hunt for them and I don't compare them with friends. When I get a little popup saying I achieved something, I just quickly look at the popup to see if I can tell what it was judging by the title, and then move on.

I don't care at all about achievements. I think there can be too many, if done poorly I'll notice it and find it to be a minor annoyance.

for skyrim and fm, i liked looking through the achievements and seeing which ones i completed, which ones i had not yet completed, and the percentage of folks that completed each achievement. for skyrim, it also activated that Completionist urge within, so now i eternally have a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that there is something more on my to-do list: complete all skyrim achievements.

This.

^^^ Agree

I'm thinking along the lines of:

1. The completist. If you see something like "Favre Award - Guided player to more than 71,838 career passing yards" available, will it motivate you to play more SP?

2. The beginner. If you see something like "Technician - Called the plays and led your team to victory", will it motivate you to spend more time learning the game.

Or do you even look at the achievement page?

Would someone be willing to post a screenshot from an Achievement page they think was done well?

You know most people probably don't play the game to get the achievement, however it IS fun to see what achievements your friends have gotten and further to see what the overall percent each achievement has been accomplished between all players.

It's fun just to see what is possible within the game world. I know that every time I see one of those little achievement pop ups come up I always shift-tab out to see which one it was and what % of overall achievements I've gotten in the game.

The number of achievements is totally arbitrary imo. I'm not sure that there's an actual number to go for. If I had to just ballpark a number I'd say 40 is pretty solid. Even a game like Adam's World of Mixed Martial Arts 4 has 56 for his game.

I use achievements sometimes as "guidelines" to try new stuff with a game. Even with EU4 where i don´t get them (since i don´t play Ironman due to the lucky nations) i can imagine myself looking up some and see how i would achieve them.

I think with a quick-hitting game like FOF achievements are great. I mean, i go through 20 seasons in a few hours. If i have the game telling me it would be great to win a championship without a player rated better than 75 or without rushing for more than 500 yards with a player, or have a 7th rounder inducted into the HOF i would certainly try to do it at some point when i lack motivation with the current game i am playing.

My take is I tend to appreciate achievements when they alert to me something that I frankly didn't even know I did. An example recently was after I finished a mission on X-Com I unlocked an achievement for using an all female squad. I wouldn't have never even noticed it if the game hadn't pointed it out to me.

I like achievements. They don't change my initial play through of games but I like seeing them pop that first play through as it feels like I found something.

Now, after the first play through I may look over the achievements and maybe try something different for my next play through in an attempt to get a few more (or, depending on the game type, I may just fire up the game to get a couple achievements).

I probably try for achievements more than most adults. I generally do them to make sure I've seen all there is in the game. The good ones nudge you toward attempting strategies that you might not try otherwise. A good example is Banished. It has 40 achievements, most of which could be unlocked during normal gameplay, but "One with Nature" forced me to try trading posts.

Having them or not wouldn't effect my purchase, but I most likely would try to complete them if they were there and not unreasonable (collect 100 hidden skulls, etc).

I turned my cards into gems.. now what?

that's my main complaint. Some seem well thought out and meant to challenge you. Others just seem like someone threw a random list together.

The problem with Banished achievements is that that game is better with mods and achievements don't work with mods. People generally like achievements (and Steam cards).

Blackie, what mods do you recommend?

Just start with one: Colonial Charter Excellent Adventure 1.3 or Colonial Charter Iron Curtain (they're pretty much the same thing, though I've been playing Iron Curtain).

This is the link to the Excellent Adventure version: http://banishedinfo.com/mods/view/67...re-BlackLiquid

It is massive. A large number of new buildings, supply chains (hemp! wine! tobacco! bricks! glass!), something like 30 new crops and so forth. Basically it's more of everything and allows you to build some pretty cool stuff.

Yeah, I'll add this about achievements: I don't hate them, and I know some people love them. As long as they aren't popping up constantly they're fine with me. Some of them can be fun, and I like some of the examples you have there Jim.

I like achievements but with one caveat: I want to be able to earn a good chunk of them (35%+) just by playing the game as a single player without going out of my way for them. I get annoyed by games that I'll have pumped 30+ hours into and I look and I've earned 3/90 achievements.

I also don't like achievements that require playing multi-player to achieve (unless the game is basically a multi-player focused game like Call of Duty or something) but that's probably just my own personality quirk.

I think its cool to get achievements, but I really dont care about them

yeah - not a fan of the achievements that would require you to play 2000+ hours to obtain. it's almost like a dare: "i dare you to waste your entire life playing my game."