Please note that for entirely inexplicable reasons this version removed the perk system from the campaign, which is a huge part of the appeal of Crimsonland’s structure and the campaign is dramatically less fun without it. The perks are still present in other modes, but most of the weapons, powerups and perks are unlocked by playing the campaign.
Is it just me, or did the Humble Bundles used to have better (or at least better-known) games?
They’ve gotten worse at making bundles I’m interested in, but mostly because they select games I already bought and put stuff I was on the fence about at higher tiers.
Squee
1784
Yep, humble has been getting worse but they’re still by and large the best for bundles. Indie Gala/Groupees/Bundlestars also have been getting worse (Groupees especially) as well. If I was to pull a reason out of my ass it would be Valve opening up the floodgates for terrible games via Greenlight, which in turn widened the pool for indie bundles since they tend to do far better if they’re offering Steam keys. So in the end I end up buying a lot of complete garbage simply because I go “Well at 20 cents a game it can’t be THAT bad, can it?”.
But it can.
IT CAN.
(that humble bundle seems alright though. only one i’ve played is crimsonland and as mentioned it’s a really excellent robotron-esque murder square)
Yup, Squee, as you’ve discovered, life’s too short to play bad games (especially when there are so many good ones).
The numbered Humble Bundles were always the best. These Android / weekly / ebook things seem to have a lot of crap.
robc04
1787
I’ve been playing Crowntakers for the past 4 hours and it’s simple fun. You have to pay enough attention to positioning, the order your troops act, the use of special abilities and potions to feel like you need to make a lot of meaningful decisions. It’s not terribly deep, but well worth spending several nights trying to get through the campaign. I decided to play my first game on easy, made a mistake selecting my unit and died before I leveled up. I’m still on my second game, on step 6 which is 2 steps away from the end. I’ve almost lost a couple battles and had some of my troops die, which I revived with some scrolls. If you die it’s game over.
robc04
1788
Wow, very tense final battle in Crowntakers and I eeked out a victory. My mercenary who looked like he was a knight or paladin had a very effective guard, so he wouldn’t attack, and then he would usually dodge the duke’s attack and dink away at him for 1 damage at a time. My main hero was down to 2 hp, so he was keeping his distance and prepared to move in if an attack was needed. My archer also was helping to slowly whittle down the duke. The duke was a pain because he would only take 1 damage per hit for the most part.
CraigM
1789
There also have been a handful of great publisher bundles lately too. The Matrix bundle was a thing I’d never thought would happen. Fantastic stuff.
As always the quality is highly variable. Been like that since after the first, which was able to cherry pick some of the most well known indies over a multi year period.
Humble is still the king when it comes to quality bundles. In recent months they’ve had some truly amazing collections of games for not a lot of cash, including the recent RPG Maker bundle, the Online Card Games bundle, a couple of Jumbo Bundles, Bohemia Interactive, Relic, Borderlands, Might and Magic and an Origin bundle. That’s all since April.
I think the problem is demand. When Humble Bundle first started out, it was a bundle every couple of weeks or so, usually with games from major publishers, developers or popular indies. When other sites like IndieGala, BundleStars, IndieRoyale and Groupees came onto the scene it started pushing the demand for bundles, and Humble responded by adding a weekly bundle, then a mobile bundle, then a storefront. Meanwhile those other sites were also adding multiple bundles per week and storefronts, so now you have a landscape where a new bundle is launched pretty much daily, and there are multiple storefronts where you can find Steam keys for popular games on sale weekly. Add to that Steam’s own adoption of the “Weeklong Deals”, “Daily Deals” and “Mid-Week Deals” and chances are damn near every game that has been out longer than 6 months is going to be on sale or in a bundle at some point shortly thereafter.
This glut is great for consumers, but makes it seem like there are a lot of crappy bundles out there. Lately sites like Groupees and IndieGala have been trawling the depths of Early Access and Greenlight to create bundles of mostly garbage just to have something new to put up every couple of days. BundleStars has been mining older budgetware titles and retro titles recently revamped to run on Steam to create some of their offerings. Demand is high for 6-12 games at $1.99-$4.99 pricepoints, so as long as that remains we’ll see some pretty questionable content. There is still quality to be found, it’s just sometimes hidden among all the noise. On the bright side, I’ve probably added more than 100 decent quality games to my collection in the past year alone for the cost of less than two AAA titles. If only I had the time to actually play them all…
More bundles.
https://www.indiegala.com/thrills
2$. Probably free after selling the Steam cards.
[indent]Cognition (I really liked this)
Face Noir
Heroes & Legends
Last Door
Lost Civilization
Morningstar
Quest for Infamy
Supreme League of Patriots[/indent]
http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/killer-bundle-4/
5$
[indent]Godus
Hero of the Kingdom 2
Lemma
Of Guards and Thieves
Overture
Silent Age
Story about my Uncle
Sudeki
Sun and Moon
theHunter Primal[/indent]
1$
[indent]Crazy Steam Bros 2
Namariel Legends: Iron Lord[/indent]
5$
[indent]Avenging Angel
Damnation
Teslagrad[/indent]
JoshL
1792
Haha, Godus is in a bundle. Looks like a good bundle otherwise, though :)
Steam today: Gnomoria - $2.71 - 66% off. Early Access.
Not much happens on a Wednesday.
tgb123
1794
Risen 3 Complete is $7.99 on Steam. What sayeth the hive mind? Is it worth it?
I’m chuckling at theHunter: Primal. Good hunting game cashing in on the dinosaur craze.
Huh, never knew they were using the Avalanche engine for that series.
Huh?? I thought this had it’s 1.0 release a number of months ago! Was I imagining that?
Anyway, for $2.change, this is a no-brainer purchase in my opinion. The best Dwarf Fortress game that’s not Dwarf Fortress.
Alan_Au
1797
It’s been a while since I checked, but last I heard, wasn’t Gnomoria woefully incomplete? Or am I confusing it with Towns?
Granath
1798
You are confusing it with Towns.
Squee
1799
Gnomoria’s pretty easily the best of the graphical Dwarf Fortress-likes. Doesn’t have the crazy depth and detail of DF (No dynamically growing hair on each character, for example. Or for a more reasonable example, the individual characters don’t have personalities in Gnomoria, while in DF they’ll have likes and dislikes and actually behave accordingly) but the graphics are nice and it the basic fort construction/management well.
Only thing that bummed me out about Gnomoria (Other than just feeling like I should play DF instead) is that some of the resource/crafting chains are pretty weird. In DF for example you can bang out some beds for your dwarfs within minutes of starting a new game, in Gnomoria a bed looks deceptively simple, but then you fall down the rabbit hole of being unable to craft THIS because you need THAT, and you can’t craft THAT until you have THIS whole production line rolling, etc. Basically just have to sleep on piles of hay since beds are high tech.
Not really a major knock against Gnomoria, it’s just that the crafting in DF is marginally more intuitive.
CraigM
1800
This might be the first time that ‘more intuitive’ has been used to describe Dwarf Fortress.
