That’s actually where I originally found about the game. Been following Splattercat for more than 10 years now (I feel old).

Love the retro visuals and the atmosphere of the screenshots/teaser video.

This one won’t be going to my backlog, I will be playing it on release. Cloudpunk is one of my all time favourite games and as weird as it sounds a lifesim x restaurant management game sounds like a perfect fit for the world of Nivalis.

I do wish they stuck to the blocky voxel-art style, I actually enjoyed the style and it made the game stand out. IMO the mixed style (the buildings still use the voxel style, but the character assets are regular 3D) doesn’t work nearly as well.

It’s really too bad the Cloudpunk DLC had that mandatory racing section, never beat it, I wonder if someone made a mod to skip it.

User reviews! Wow, it took them how many years? Or is over half a decade?

I am no Valve fanboy (they were one of early “innovators” on lootboxes and they opposed consumer right protections in other countries, but compared to the vast majority of gaming companies they are not terrible (fucking Microsoft buying everything up and running the companies to the ground). That being said I think a wholesale abandonedment of all major US-based tech platforms is in order. They seem well on their way to adopting a permanent culture of criminality and dishonesty (not to say it’s a plurality, let alone a majority of people who are like that), but you only need 15-20% of the country for a long but permanent step in moral decline.

The new lady in charge of Microsoft’s gaming decision seems completely out of touch, as if she has no real clue what she is working with. I am sure she is an excellent career professional and a very intelligent individual. But gaming also requires creativity and not just a business plan.

Lucky you! The book is great too, it’s easy to get into if you enjoyed the series.

I don’t know whether one should be laughing or not, but PC gaming will likely always retain a solid core of players that don’t align with mainstream trends.

That’s fair, but at the very least you have to recognise that’s it’s fair to call Star Citizen a scam.

I mean they’ve literally lied about planning to have exploration gameplay and continue to sell JPEGs/cash shop items worth hundreds of dollars when they have no plans to include exploration gameplay.

Thats just one notable example. There are many others (hundreds of major cases of lying and premeditated falsehoods in search of financial gain).

There are a couple:

• Project Highrise
• Mad Tower Tycoon

SimTower actually runs OK with Windows 10 (64 bit) the UI can be a bit small with modern resolutions. It’s been a few years, but I believe it was the winevdm solution cited on PGW. I ran a bunch of 3.1 era games for fun.

I played SimTower a lot as kid. Turns out the developer of SimTower (Maxis was the publisher outstide of Japan where it was released as The Tower) released a sequel called Yoot Tower. It is nice upgrade even if the core of the two games are extremely similar. It also works on W10.

But it’s always good to try new games. :)

Cheers!

I would personally be OK with engine updates (with a focus on getting that timeless look like in HL 1/2) and a continuation of the story.

Unless they decide to go with a hybrid genre model, it will be difficult to make a game as innovative as HL1/HL2.

I feel like it was somewhat big back in the day. I played it back then I wasn’t the only one. :)

I was a big fan of RtCW back in the day (played through it multiple times) and this is the first time I am hearing of Cursed Sands.

Also very strange that it’s not on Mobygames.

Maybe I missed the sarcasm, but this was back in the mid 2000s when Valve was planning to switch to an episodic model. As we can see (from both Half-Life and SiN), that approach didn’t really work (at least in an industry-wide way).

It’s not a matter of continental purity, I would have no issues with ML services from any democratic-leaning country as long as they have the capability to choose an independent path that’s not subject to American/Chinese pressure.

I will also note that it was Brussee himself that pitched the notion of an European game engine. The concept doesn’t really work if you are using American services (Anthropic or OpenAI) for core elements of your game engine architecture.

Reliance on OpenAI/Palantir/Anthropic in the ML space is asking for trouble as you give the Americans your data and you open yourself up to blackmail, threats and extortion.

I also wouldn’t hope for any fundamental change in attitudes towards things like crime, corruption among the leadership elements of American society in the next 20-30 years. For better or for worse, the median American is too well off to have any incentive to put pressure on their leadership to address crime. And when they start wondering

I would love to be completely wrong on all of this, but I am afraid it’s a bit too naive and careless to just assume all problems will magically disappear just like that.

I am sure you didn’t mean it in a bad way, but usage for the military is not necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on your real life situation.

I live in Ukraine and I would only be happy for ML tech to help save Ukrainian lives (both military and civilian), increase the efficiency of killing of russian invaders (on an absolute and cost basis) and enable more efficient strikes on military facilities and oil infrastructure in the imperial core of russia.

If it’s based on LLMs from Anthropic or OpenAI, it’s still dependent on Americans.

Le Chat/Mistral seems to have improved quiet a bit for my LLM use cases since I last tried it, but I have no clue how well their services work for game development use cases.

I would argue a European alternative needs to have something different to beat the American oligarchic “freedom polemics in the front, corruption and crime in the back” model. Open source seems like the best way to develop services that can resist corruption and focus on making a good product. This doesn’t seem to be open source, would be interesting to hear what their USP is beyond alignment with EU regulations and deep integration with ML tech (that is still dependent on US service providers).

It’s interesting how it seems indie games releases with a similar genre/concept always come out around the same time, in clusters.

Yes, there was definitely an Unreal Tournament map built around the cannon.

I was even curious and it turns out it was an Assault map called Overlord for UT99 based on the WW2 operation.

https://unreal.fandom.com/wiki/AS-Overlord

There might have been another one.

Although you definitely don’t get to manage them on a day to day basis in UT99.

Interesting concept, I am surprised something similar have never been done before. That being said, it’s possible that someone made a more primitive version of this gameplay concept on newgrounds and it just never got big.

Timberborn is a lot of fun, you can build some crazy worlds when you reach the end game.