Reducing the Pile of Shame that is my Steam Backlog

[SirFozzie]

So, as part of the move this weekend we'll be without home internet for two weeks. Now, I managed to ameliorate SOME of the impact by upgrading my Google FI phone data to Unlimited with tethering, but A) that doesn't start until the 11th, and B) they reserve the right to throttle the fuck out of it at 50GB (which is less than one AAA game these days)


So, I decided to start a project idea early. As we all know, the pile of shame/Steam Back Log never shrinks. But I'll make it shrink. I went through all my games, and I'm going to try to reduce the backlog by playing a bunch of games at least for one hour, to see if it hooks me (or "Why the fuck did I buy this in the first place?" in things I actually bought instead of say, humble bundle stuff)

. This is what I came up with.


Telepath Tactics Liberated
Yes Your Grace
For the King
Tilefinder
Rogue Trader
Marvel Snap
Legends of Kingdom Rush
Wasteland 2
Wasteland 3
Vestaria Saga 1: War of the Scions
Star Dynasties
Realms of Arkania: Star Trail
Low Magic Age
Mad Games Tycoon
Draft Day Sports: Football (Pro/College)
Draft Day Sports: Basketball (pro/College)
Franchise Hockey Manager 9
Cosmic Star Heroine
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Storm Ground
Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children
Stellar Tactics
Disco Elysium
The Last Spell
The Legend of Heroes (one of them)
Ferry Fencer F Advent Dark Force
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark
Tales of Berseria
Road Redemption
Showtime!
City of Gangsters
Company of Crime
DungeonTop: Spell Sword Cards
Into the Breach
Persona 4 golden
Rebel Cops
Sigma Theory
Bomber Crew
Deep Rock Galactic
Fractured Space
Hot Wheels Unleashed
Iron Harvest
Knights of the Chalice
Symphony of War: THe Nephelim Saga
Citizen Sleeper
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age
Octopath Traveller
Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire
Soccer Story


Lots of strategy/RPG games in there. Wonder if anything will grab me.

[SirFozzie]

Day 0 Report: Also known as "I DID WHAT?"

Yesterday was my last chance to get things installed, for today's move. (It's actually going on as I write this. I'm staying far far away from the madness)

So, yesterday afternoon I was installing some of the games that were on the list and not already installed and ran into one game that wouldn't finish installing. Baldur's Gate 3. Quite a large game (63GB download), and at the 60 GB mark, it would stop with the message "Corrupt Download".

I took the recommended steps, trying it on different disks, cleaning the download cache, blanking out the downloading folder.. no change. Each time, after I had downloaded 60 GB it would stop with the same message and not go any further. Three different attempts. Nearly 200GB of download time.

So, looking for info, I came across several third-party "help" sites that suggested uninstalling and reinstalling Steam would fix this issue. I promptly went into Windows 10's "Add and Remove Programs" settings program and uninstalled Steam.

It was going by rather quickly, and I was all set to reinstall Steam, when I noticed some of the directories that were listed as being deleted. It showed one of my game directories.

Wait, uninstalling steam means uninstalling all the games in the Steam Library? *All, say, FIVE HUNDRED GB OF MY GAMES?

This is what we generally call an OH SHIT moment. Or, the alternative title to this report. "I DID WHAT?"

(Just as an aside, this caught folks I griped to about this. The post where I found the solution mentioned there's a way to uninstall/reinstall Steam without losing your Steam Library. Would have been REALLY nice to have known that.)

So, 12 hours before the move starts and the computer will be without reliable internet for at least one week and possibly two, I have to reinstall all the Steam games. ALL OF THEM.

Thankfully, I could queue up a bunch of downloads while finishing packing things, but I keep an eye on things. I'm not sure I can get all the games back before I have to shut down, so it's prioritizing which games are more important, and also, size. Do I want one game that takes 75 GB of download time (Cyberpunk) when I could get four games for the same download-time (say, the two Pathfinder RPG games, Pro Strategy Football and Football Manager, each of which could probably distract me for at LEAST a day or two on their own). Cyberpunk didn't make the redownload list, because I can always play this other stuff that's on the Backlog of Shame instead of it.

So, I wake up this morning at 7, an hour or so before the move officially starts, and I had budgeted my time well. The last game of 65 was downloading. Well, really the 64th of 65. *And 10 minutes later, when it finished I was left with one game in the Downloads queue.

Baldur's Gate 3.

Corrupt Download

(Insert Fozzie swearing like Donald Duck on a three day meth bender)

so, hunting through more help pages, I come across this on the 2nd Page of "Patch 9 Notes on the Developer's forums", after all the other things that I tried (Patch 9 is the current patch level for the game)

"In the client, in the Steam menu select Settings, then Downloads, and try changing your Download Region."

What the hell, it's worth a shot.

It works instantly, and finishes normally.

And below that, there's a note that if you have to reinstall Steam:


You could also try reinstalling Steam. You can effectively do this without having to redownload any games installed on the same drive by deleting everything in the Steam install folder except for Steam.exe and the SteamApps folder, rebooting and running the Steam.exe executable.

So it turns out there was two opportunities to save about EIGHT HUNDRED GIGABYTES OF Downloads (remember, multiple attempts to download a 60GB game as well as reinstalling all my games), and I missed the metaphorical equivalent of the off-ramp both times.

Facepalm moment. Actually, it might qualify for the double facepalm

[SirFozzie]

Still no home internet (FIOS moved the install date at 2:45 PM on 1/10 from "1/10, 1-3 PM" to 1/20. So no home internet for a couple weeks!

But here we go:

backlog of shame reviews (Plus a couple bonus)

Instead of a numerical grade, I'm going to give it the "Foz Quick Review Scale": (in ascending order) Yuck, Ugh. Meh, Ok, Good, Great, Awesome)

Troubleshooter:Abandoned Children (No, not the action-adventure Pen and Paper RPG based off Belgian and French Comics (That's The Troubleshooters), nor the pen and paper one that was the base version of Paranoia two versions ago (Paranoia:Troubleshooters). This is basically K-Pop X-COM. A massive city forbidden from having its own standing forces due to international pressure, and the Criminals are more and more brazen, destructive and over the top. So, they created private security forces with the power to investigate, detain and arrest criminals (by hitting them with large swords and various explosive abilities, natch). Kinda like Judge Dredd without the fascism and with a serving of Anime Tropes (I can think of several past animes that did this kind of concept). It's like someone saw X-Com's game play, and decided to bolt on a whole shitton of extra things on it, including online play if that's your forte, but I'm talking more about a Final Fantasy style mastery board and endlessly grindy stuff. I think the grind is going to get to me after a while (I've done a few missions, and the amount of extraneous stuff is mind blowing) and I think they could have toned it down several degrees, but it's a good concept. It's not a short game, a single complete (not completionist) playthrough is estimated at 60-100 hours, and that's if you don't decide to grind endlessly. Not sure I have the willpower/energy for a 100 hour game with all the other games on my backlog (including all the other games that I play that are endless time sinks), but it feels like that it could fill some time.


Foz Rating: Ok, but your thoughts on very lengthy/grindy games may raise or lower this rating in your eyes.


Pro Strategy Football 23: A football sim that is more strategic then Madden, but less in the weeds then say, most Sports Sims. This focuses on more of the coaching (on-field aspects, as at the casual level, all you do is select formation and playtype (Inside run/outside run/middle run, Short/Medium/Long Pass, trick plays, Special teams, etcetera). Expert Level lets you set more stuff like setting blitzers on defense, or setting up receiver routes on pass plays. It's all strategy based, and tries to find a sweet spot in career play between minutiae and speed of play (there's no contract system, instead a number of players are randomly selected from each team each year to become free agents (you can control how many, and if you can keep one would-be Free Agent per season as a franchised player, and then there's a draft on Free Agents before the usual Draft). Its setup is very much like a mobile game (they even tell you to tap or click rows to select them), but no monetization stuff. I'd like to see more official support in non-NFL setups (it needs more base leagues to start from then the standard NFL-style setup). If you love the grognardy stuff, you may want to try other games like the Draft Day Sports football games, with the bonus there being that you can link their college and pro games together for a shared universe), but it's not super expensive ($20), and I've gotten more than its purchase price from it already.


Foz Rating: Good to Good+ based on my own tastes.


Monster Train: One of my go-to "I have 35 minutes to waste before going to bed or going out" games. It's kinda like a card game-tower defense mashup. You have a four level train barreling through hell to relight the frozen flame of hell, and angels move through your train attacking anyone on the level and trying to move up through the train to the top level to attack your pyre. If your pyre takes too much damage, you lose. It's good for bitesized game play and I have my favorites. One suggested mod is the "Restart Battle" button, as it will allow you to correct mistakes (putting the wrong monster in front, for example, as all enemies attack the front monster until it's dead or the turn ends), and definitely install the mod that gets rid of the opening cinematic which is cool the first time, but annoying if you launch the game repeatedly. I'm giving it a great in that it fills a short amount of time, and while there's cosmetics available, and some gated stuff by XP, you can play as little or as much as you want, and each run is independent of the next (you'll get different units/upgrades depending on the faction you play as, but again, no mobile transactions, except for a DLC, which is pretty standard these days). It's pretzels. Quick, filling, and lets you move on without stuffing yourself or consequences.


Foz Rating: Great


Slay the Spire: Definitely a tougher 35 minute card game, I do like the custom mode. I haven't got the "official" ending that requires you to start with a base deck, do several challenges in a run, then defeat a super-boss at the end of your run, but taking one of the four base classes/decks that come with the game, and setting up modifiers (my personal favorite is setting max difficulty, but giving myself the ability to draft a starting deck out of 30 random cards rather then the base boring cards, and giving me and the enemies bonus strength). Again, a very addictive, but bite sized game in that each Spire run is different. I average between 20-35 minutes a run in the balls to the wall mode (and that's even with the double boss but no super-boss). Super addictive


Foz Rating: Great

[thealmighty]

Hey Foz, what about this rating system I came across...


Terrible, Lousy, Poor, Fair, Decent, Good, Pretty Good, Very Good, Terrific, Excellent


Just sayin'.

[SirFozzie]

How primitive. *laughs*

I came up with mine as a joke, when my first impression of the grind of Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children was "Meh to Meh+"

[SirFozzie]

Backlog of Shame Review: Dungeontop: Spell Sword Cards

*

Another rogue like card game, this one's twist is that the cards you play end up on a board which all characters can move around on. The key point is that you can only summon units next to an existing unit, so there's a lot of tactical side to the hearthstone like battle system. Roguelike of course means stuff is unlocked between runs. It's good, but the tactical side left me.. like... a bit dry. It takes some getting used to. Do you summon quick acting units to lock the enemy boss in place during their turn (knowing they'll likely die to attacks), or do you build out slowly, risking losing tactical space if the enemy rushes your hero (which is a unit on the field)

*

Review: Good to Good+