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Oh man, I couldn't not buy this:



Rock Boshers is to the good old Speccy as Shovel Knight was to the NES. If it's half as good I'll be laughing.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

For a spectrum game that actually looks fun.

I read of quite a few people having long runs ended by the ice breaking under them. Was wondering if those risks get ramped up as time progresses? If so seems a bit harsh. (I've got no objection to things like increased animal swarms or something).

PS do you know if there are going to be bears in the final release? Bears would be awesome

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They've nailed everything, from the loading screen to the colour clash. It controls much more responsively and the music is, while in the same vein, a lot more layered than a Speccy could produce.

As a game itself it's not that great but that might be because I've been playing a lot of Binding of Isaac Rebirth recently, which has the same twin stick mechanic done a hell of a lot better.

You can download the original, non DX version, free from the devs site. Link

I will do that. I have a friend who's a Comodore 64 enthusiast. I'm sure he'll get a kick out of it too.

By the way have you played Indie Heat, Lords of Chaos, Laser Squad Nemesis, IK+ International Karate, Tank Attack, or Exile? Those are my favorites.

I had a Speccy 128 (the one with the proper keyboard) which came after my ZX81. I figured I was a pretty hardcore Sinclair fan until I was down at a friend's last week and he produced a ZX80 out of the cupboard. You had to build those yourself.

My favourite Speccy game, and it holds up surprisingly well today, is The Great Escape. Other than that it was the original Elite, Tau Ceti and had a real soft spot for Knight Tyme.

Finished Bioshock on the PC and the last third was a drop off from the rest. It still stands out for its great atmosphere, tension, story (though I'm not crazy about Levine's narrative approach) combat mechanics and overall creativity. I usually dislike FPS of any kind really, but Bioshock is an exception for a reason I think.

I haven't heard of any of those. I'll have to check them out.

Oh and if you like NES games, Faxanadu is pure gold.

FYI:

Xbox Live is dropping prices on games over the next 16 days (till Jan. 1, 2015), with select games on sale each day. It started yesterday. I snagged LEGO Lord of the Rings and Tomb Raider for less than $10. Bioshock Infinite was less than $5. Titanfall and Thief were around $11. Pretty nice deals.

Pretty certain my 500GB hard drive is going to fill up pretty quickly over the next two weeks.

The Long Dark got another update. Now they've got three difficulty settings (including an exploration mode where nothing attacks you) and a handful of other tweaks, including some UI improvements and new items. One of the cooler (no pun intended) additions is herbal tea which can be drunk cold or warmed up, and if you drink it while it's warmed up (it doesn't last, obviously), you get a heat bonus. There's also a crafting system, but it looks like it takes a lot of hunting and a lot of in-game hours to make anything decent. But it looks like it produces awesome wildman clothing

Anyway, after my incredibly disheartening end in The Long Dark I really thought I was about done. But apparently I'm not. I played again and lived for a few days. Started again and now I'm over a week and starting to find a foothold (though not a gun, ugh). Still incredibly impressed by how poignant and storylike all the playthroughs feel like, especially the ones that end in death.

I don't know if I have a specific goal, but I guess I would like to live longer than the 22 days I lived before, find the rifle, and complete the trek I had in mind during that playthrough.

I'm about 95% sure that this is just in the second map I mentioned, and that it only happens if you basically try to walk off the map. I definitely noticed pronounced cracking noises (beyond the ones you get when you normally walk on the ice), so I could have turned back. Also, the update they just released changes how this works: it's not instadeath any more, but you do go instantly to freezing and it affects your clothes, which seems way better.

No idea, but that'd be great, yeah. I wonder if they haven't because it doesn't fit the ecology of the area they've set the game in? I say do it either way, though.

Ahh sweet. I've been absorbed in the wastelands of Elite, but if that hadn't happened I'd def still be there watching my breath against a pink new dawn, and trying to fish with giant frozen mittens on

As classy as it is for an Alpha, I think I am happy to be distracted for a while though, while they put a bit more flesh on those mountainous bones. Hot drinks, in-depth crafting & sodden survivalism were exactly the sort of things I was hoping for tho

If the story mode is interesting too could be quite a game!

Yeah, I dig that. It's actually funny how you have to muster yourself after a long run ends in The Long Dark. Shorter ones, there's an easy "get back on the horse" thing, where you want to implement the lesson you just learned, but if you go a week or more or something, it's pretty hard to want to play again right after it ends. But in my case it kinda gnawed on me, and the number of games I have that I can just fire up and play by myself without a lot of notice (puppy-related scheduling), and stop fairly abruptly, are kinda small.

Anyway, really good chance that after this run, I'll just do some small ones to test out some of the crafting and hunting, and then do like you and wait for a bigger update before playing much more.

For those driving game enthusiasts, Trackmania Valley is amazing.

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Yep, been playing Trackmania off and on since the first free game. Don't have Valley but I've got Stadium.

Been playing a couple of minimalist RPGs recently - NEO Scavanger and Sanctuary.

Sanctuary is basically an ASCII text adventure. I applaud the idea but the humour is somewhat grating.

NEO Scavenger, on the other hand, is fantastic. It's the work of one guy and has been in Early Access for ages, finally getting a full release this week. I'll stick the James Recommends (if Keanu Reeves was a game developer...) up to give you a feel, not watched it yet but Extra Credits is one of the best YouTube gaming channels.



It's the most hardcore survival game I've ever played.

I'll probably stop talking about this soon-ish, but The Long Dark is 33% off on Steam right now. Just FYI.

Yeah, I really don't know who'd want a game like that.

The Long Dark update!

Still going on this latest run. I had some really close calls early: I had enough to drink (well, in the sense of having maybe a day or half-day's margin in inventory), but was scrounging all over for food and not finding enough. Then I got caught in a blizzard while trying to find more. I found a rundown house frame and thought I remembered actual houses nearby...wandered around with the lantern, barely able to see in front of me, condition rapidly deteriorating (I think it was around 11%). Nothing. I somehow went in a circle and ended up at the same house frame.

So, I settled there, and there was a stove in the corner, which saved my life. I had enough left in me to start a fire, forage for wood, and keep going. I had to forage for enough (even though it dropped my condition further) to keep the fire going all night so I could start recovering. Just as I started to get to the point where I could leave, another blizzard hit and I had to do the same thing all over again. I think this was day 2.

Long story short, I had to go to Coastal Highway because food was weirdly scarce on Mystery Lake. I finally found a rifle in a fishing shack and I ended up holing up in a house on the side of the map. Wolves were constantly patrolling, and I used all of my ammo killing them and taking all of their meat back to the house. There was no stove or fireplace so I had to step outside to cook the meat and boil water, but I probably spent a week and a half doing that.

I'm up to 25 days now, and I've transferred most of my things over towards the center of the map. I'm in a house now with a stove, which helps a lot; got tons of water but I'll be out of wolf meat soon (decent amount of other food supplies). Wolves are patrolling this area too and I've got no bullets (and only 3 bandages, somehow). I'm stockpiling boiled water and killing a day or two, after which I'm going to carefully explore the other nearby buildings and then, at some point, make a run for it.

I'm running out of places to go, though. It'll be hard to haul most of the things of value back to Mystery Lake with me, and when I get there there'll only be a handful of places I haven't been. But I would like to get back to the lake, and to Trapper's Homestead, and try a little crafting before my supplies run out. I'd like to make 50 days, but I don't think there'll be enough food unless I find more ammo so I can hunt.

Either way, I probably won't play much after this run until the next big update, since it's the longest I've done and there are only a small number of things I've yet to do.

Yeah I'd like to see more ad hoc ways of dealing with wolves really. Stuff like burning torches perhaps, or hell just a plank of wood. Certainly it's weird that you can't tote the knife as a weapon of last resort.

Little touches like this would really add to it. Making semi-absurd 'knife on stick' constructions doubly-so. (Especially on the understanding that experimenting like this would let you make increasingly complex, if rustic & difficult, creations. Lots more ways to learn by failing And more risk vs resources quandaries)

*EDIT* Now I think about it, having a variety of survivalist / hunting / local-lore books spread throughout the maps might be cool too. Really rare items, but the sort of thing you could guess where they might be found. They could open up everything from improved kit possibilities to hidden locations (maybe a local diary leads you to finding out an old survivalist lives out in a bivouac somewhere - you find his place and either the remains of his kit or notes / blueprints on how he built them etc).

Seems like it would fit with the vibe, and give you an extra motive to explore etc.

If I remember correctly, the benefit you get from the knife and hatchet comes from just having them in your inventory; if you check the UI (might not have been true before the last update) it says "Fighting with" or something, and I believe it gets them off quicker and/or increases the likelihood that they die from the encounter. They've added to the tracking, too, in that if you hurt them enough you can follow the trail of blood to see where they end up, though you lose it after awhile (this happened to me!).

That said, yeah, it's a little goofy that the mechanic with a weapon and without is kinda the same. And there's one guy who lived for over 900 days in part because he had a gaming mouse that he programmed to mash buttons for him, so that every wolf attack was over as fast as possible. I'm moderately confident this will be improved a lot before the final release. And it would go a long way towards making the Sandbox mode truly endless if you could hunt (not without difficulty, of course) even without the rifle, whereas now your best hope is to let yourself get attacked and survive and hope you hurt them enough in the process.

I definitely like the idea of trying goofy configurations with different levels of success--maybe even semi-random, but within a general range.

Oh, also, you can sometimes scare (or just fend) wolves off with flares. And I've heard you can distract them with food if thrown at the right time, but I haven't done this yet. So they do have some cool variations there that they can build on.

Ahh yeah, I loved the idea of the blood trail stuff for wounded game. (Would be mad if they could add temporary footprints too - that sounds feasible. Broken branches and such may be asking too much tho )

Didn't realise that about the knife, that's something then. Would almost prefer it if you had to have it to hand though, as a constant balancing act (and worry when you're moving by lamp light ) - especially as wolf attacks can be so swift.

Yeah have managed to keep a wolf at bay with a flare while I backed away to my base actually. It did seem pleasingly skittish though, as it prowled after me. Like it might decide to go for me anyway...

Ah nice, maybe you could build up to wolf traps