Oh my god! I used to read Sam & Fuzzy about 2 decades ago when I was a teenager! I didn’t realize the strip was still running. It got weird for a while and the main characters disappeared for about a year of strips, so I kind of lost interest. I wonder what’s happened in the last 20 years. It looks like it was rebooted about 15 years ago, and I don’t recognize any characters in recent strips.

For Karl!

The Driller I regularly play with has a nasty habit of abandoning our group to go drill tunnels where we don’t need tunnels. He’s always looking to take shortcuts directly to his objective instead of following the caves.

Then, when we’re trying to run to the drop pod, Molly will just go straight up one of his tunnels in the ceiling, where we can’t follow. Then we’re frantically running around, trying to find another route to the drop pod without Molly’s flags.

Oh, and he fights every large bug with C4, nearly killing us all in the process.

I’ll get there one day… but it’ll be a while before I have the free time and motivation to slog through it again.

Good to know, thanks!

You’re absolutely correct, I am approaching it from the wrong mindset. The thing is, I like my crafting games to be chill sandbox games. I have ADHD and am easily distracted, so being dumped into a world where I’m struggling just to survive, and then finding threats everywhere while I’m trying to progress on a build or something… I find myself stressed and unable to focus on progression. So I prefer games that let me go at my own pace, without distractions from the task I’m focusing on.

With Subnautica, I don’t know where to go to progress without spending time exploring and getting distracted along the way. So it will take me hundreds of hours to actually complete the game; time that I rarely dedicate to any single game. And too much time if I’m not having fun along the way.

I’ve been meaning to give Techtonica another chance. I was enjoying it, but I tried to play it with a friend and he checked out early because the build menus and crafting mechanics were too complicated for him. Because of that, we switched to another game to play regularly and I never really got back to Techtonica. I agree with my friend that it was a bit complex at first, but I was enjoying figuring it out.

For me, games are strictly a form of entertainment. I play to escape reality and do something fun for a while. So when a game “treats you like an adult,” I feel like the fun is gone and now I’m stuck working just to gain a little bit of progress. I don’t get a sense of reward from that, I just get frustrated.

Especially if there are important events that you can miss. I used to be a completionist with my games (I still am, to a degree) and I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of a game to really enjoy every bit of effort the developers put into creating this world. But finding out a game takes 50+ hours to beat, and then realizing that I may have missed important details and that I’ll need to replay that lengthy game to find them again… no way. That’s too much effort. I mentally check out really quick.

I agree with you about The Outer Wilds. I think I’ve played about an hour of that game and I had no idea what I was doing or what the plot was about. Everyone kept saying it’s better if you go into it blind, so I didn’t read anything before playing and, well… I don’t know what I was playing. That’s another game on my list to give a second chance before I give up on it completely.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t been able to get into Subnautica. I spent like 2 hours swimming in circles, trying to figure out what to do in that game before I realized I was supposed to check messages or something on the escape pod first. I felt totally abandoned and alone in the ocean, without much of a direction to go. It was a little too “open world” for me, if that makes sense.

Pacific Drive, on the other hand, drops you right into the action, with three people in your ear helping guide you through this strange and unique world. You can always go off and explore regions on your own, but your primary objectives are always clear. I don’t think I could get lost if I tried.

I’ve been meaning to go back and try Subnautica again. Maybe I’ll do a write-up on it and see if I enjoy it, now that I’m used to crafting/exploring games.

I didn’t even know Netflix had a games department, and I have a Netflix account. I’m assuming this is just another effort on their part for further enshittification of that service. Perhaps it’s finally time I unsubscribed from Netflix.

Yeah, it’s pretty easy. There’s a little technique required for climbing/balancing on ledges, but it’s not super challenging and you can always adjust your camera view to make it easier.

You’re welcome! Like I mentioned, I almost didn’t get to post today thanks to computer issues. Fortunately, I have a few other non-gaming computers floating around my home (I used to be an IT guy), so my screenshots might not be 4K quality, but I could technically find something else to play with if I needed to.

Actually I have a Steam Deck too! I wonder how decent its resolution/graphics would look on a PC screen…

If you like, the developer displays his phone number on screen every time you die. You could try to reach out to him and let him know his game is broken. If he’s still engaged with the game, he might look into it.

In the 18+ hours I’ve played, I only had one enemy takedown mission where the number didn’t go down as I killed enemies. Other than that, I’ve never experienced any bugs in this game.

But I’ve played exclusively solo campaign mode, so maybe there’s something there. I did try to go online last night and it just errored out, so maybe multiplayer/online mode is buggy.

This is actually a spiritual successor to the Road Rash franchise. Made by a different studio, but a tribute to that older game series.

I usually give a warning in advance that spoilers are upcoming and to skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to read them, then do the spoiler tag for an entire paragraph. That way, even if the spoiler tag doesn’t work, people know to skip the next paragraph to avoid it. Sometimes I’ll even do a full-caps “END OF SPOILERS HERE” to catch eyes and help people skip over them.

Unfortunately, it’s not just an Epic Games exclusive, it’s actually published by Epic Games. Which means it probably won’t ever come to Steam.

The rest of the Alan Wake franchise (and the Control franchise, including the upcoming Control 2) are published by 505 Games or Remedy themselves, so those all get Steam releases.

I don’t think I’ve posted this here yet, but I’ve actually been compiling all these posts into a separate blog. As much time and effort as I’ve been putting into them, I’d hate for them to get wiped if this community goes down, or heaven forbid, I got booted by a mod, etc. So you can either follow my posts here in /c/games, or check them out on my blog. I upload them at the same time, so it doesn’t matter where you go to read them.

I have yet to beat it myself. The first time I played it, I eventually came across a boss fight that proved too tough, and the only way to level up Jesse was to go and fight random spawns around the building. I got tired of the grind and stopped playing it. But I’m hoping to actually play through to the end this time around. I plan to do all spawn events as they come this time, instead of skipping them to focus on moving the plot forward, so that I’ll be better prepared for that fight when it comes.

I’m actually very careful to avoid spoilers in my posts. Sure, I get pretty far into the meat of the gameplay before I end my post… but I do my best to avoid any big reveals that might ruin the game for interested players. And I’ve never revealed the ending to a game.

At best, I’ve posted my speculation for the direction a game’s plot might be headed, based on my incomplete gaming session. But I made it clear it was just a personal guess.

My intent is to get people invested in the story, so when I leave off, they’ll want to go check it out and see what happens next. Besides, some of the best screenshots are from the action in the middle of gameplay. I can’t play 15 mins of a game and expect to make a solid post about it; I need to have some sense of what the game is about, and that requires a bit more exploration into the plot.

Since you’re familiar with Control, you’ll probably notice I left out some pretty big details from nearly the start of the game. You gotta have some unknown plot elements, or else I’m just narrating the first hour of the game, and that’s not fun when you actually go to play it for the first time.