MadmanEpic

This game might capture the fantasy journey feeling the best of anything I've played, and is maybe the most "better than the sum of its parts" feeling on every level. No one part of it is particularly good on its own but it just comes together so well. Even the visuals are like that, even though the individual assets mostly look pretty rough you get some really dang nice vistas. It's a real shame it never gets talked about.

This thread isn't dead until people stop posting, dang it! Just about every game in the Ace Combat has incredibly good music, 7 being the most recent. You can find downloads for all of their soundtracks at Khinsider. (In particular I'd recommend also looking at the soundtracks of Ace Combat 04, Ace Combat 5, and Ace Combat Zero, all of which are on that site as well.) On an unrelated note, Boneworks also has a great synthy soundtrack. As far as I'm aware, you can only download it by buying it through Steam, but I'm sure you can work something else out if need be.

when the horde appears

I'm surprised Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead isn't on the list. It's the open source zombie (and everything else) roguelike survival game. If you want to take on the apocalypse as a failed cyborg, a wilderness man rejected from society and living off of the land in the forests of New England, or a schizophrenic alcoholic trucker who only knows Tai-chi and knitting, there's no contest. It takes a bit to learn, but compared to other "hard" roguelikes, it's fairly approachable, since the controls make relative sense and the launcher comes with a really nice tileset. It still may be a bit confusing initially if you're not familiar with these sorts of roguelikes at all, but you'll probably be adjusted to the controls within a few hours. Don't underestimate the wildlife. If you can see the coyotes, it's already too late.

I'd say this one is worth it on sale. It's easily one of the best looking games I've ever played, and the investigation aspect is fun, but they're right about how short it is.

It's free, so you may as well give it a go if you have half an hour or so free. Also, it's not GaaS, so it gets brownie points on that front.

If it tells you anything, it took me about three minutes to remember I had already played this.

Very fun with friends. Truly embraces glorious dwarven culture.

I liked it. It has some big issues, but it does some pretty interesting things. I particularly liked the murder mystery sidequest that you're left to solve entirely on your own and which changes the ending based on whether you got it right (or at all). A sequel to this is in development that carries on with the outcome of the first game and plays more similarly to Deus Ex. I've heard you can talk your way through the entire game, so it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

Heads up, this is definitely not an exploration game. It's very much focused on deathmatch and objective modes, just with a similar setting to STALKER. I made a video about it a while ago as well. Is linking that allowed? I guess it isn't not allowed.

This one is a lot better than I expected. It's kind of like the Dead Space to Darkwood's Silent Hill, with more action while still retaining some spookiness. A sequel is also in development!

This game is great. If you don't want to buy it before giving it a go, a demo version is available on the developer's itch.io page.

This game is a bit of a mixed bag for me, since I do like it, but I liked the old closed alpha and beta versions a lot more. The issue is that this game makes you way too overpowered with melee. When swinging a melee weapon, you can dash a few meters (or much, much farther with some weapons) instantly to score a hit, and cycle through multiple weapons instantly to counter the cooldown. This is opposed to the earlier versions, where there was no pausing and no dashing, meaning the melee combat just felt like Hotline Miami in space, which was way better in my opinion. The result of that change is that running in and meleeing everyone is usually the right call if possible. That's an issue because it means the developer had to then dramatically increase the number of shields and armor that enemies have to counter it, and those are more annoying than fun to deal with. I wish there was just an option to decrease those and disable dashing/pausing, because in either case, there's pretty much a "correct" way to go about things. There are a lot of ways you could complete your objectives, but most of the time, they won't be nearly as practical. the exception to this is just stealing another ship and using its missiles to make a new front door.

This one is a pretty great time. There are some performance issues and a bit of jankiness but it's a really fun and occasionally thrilling game. I'd say it's more of a stealth game than raw exploration, though.

It's surprisingly easy to go really, really fast in this game. Feels nice.

Heads up for anyone who gives this a go, I'd probably recommend the original over the director's cut if the GOG download includes it. The only significant difference as far as I can tell is that there's a plot in the form of voiceovers in the director's cut, but I find that it kind of kills the atmosphere of the rest of the game, since it was all silent originally. You can probably get around this in the director's cut version by just muting the voices, though.

This isn't a huuuge deal, but Streets of Rogue, which is listed as Early Access, fully released a couple of weeks ago. yay

3 videos in one week? My god, Ross has discovered the secrets of time travel! Again!

Sure, but even then, but for most games, a fully-fledged server emulator is still not necessary.

This is really great, guys. Today, the United States Congress released the finalized set of new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which force hardware manufacturers and software developers to allow users to modify their products in order to retain usability. This means that you can no longer be restricted from tampering with your phone or whatever to keep it from breaking, but more interestingly for us (and most pertinently to this forum), it includes a section specifically outlining the exceptions for video games on pages 81-83. It's mostly in legaleze, so I'll dissect it all real quick: This is the key bit. It allows that lawfully acquired games that are no longer playable due to the loss of a central server to be modified in order to become playable again. Now, those games that were previously lost to always-online DRM can be legally cracked to function without it. The section here is really fantastic for the historical preservation of games. If a game's DRM does not work anymore, and it is no longer sold anywhere, it can be modified to work. It's a bit vague, and IANAL, but to my understanding, emulators, at least in the name of preservation alone, are no longer illegal under DMCA. (The ROMs, however, probably still are, at least as long as they're being distributed.) This is where we get into more specific detail. This is a bit of a bummer, since it means that preservation is still only 100% legal for games that only use a central server for DRM, but it's still good to have it set in stone. This is a heavy hitter. Whether the company has officially stated that server support will return or not, after six months, modifying it to work is legal. This should make it harder for the companies to go for their beloved scummy plays. For once, this is pretty self-explanatory. It sadly doesn't include fan-made servers in the exemption. Just in case there's any confusion as to what constitutes as eligibility for libraries, archives, and museums, this is here to clear that up. While the lack of protection for third-party servers kinda sucks, the rest of this is really fantastic for gamers. I was surprised that it wasn't already discussed at length here, so I decided to show it to you all. Hopefully this will make it far harder for companies to go after people trying to play the games they kill.

Beautiful.

What kind of hurts is that Ubisoft has proven that it is totally able to make really really nice nighttime settings before in The Division, which makes every other one of their games look like trash when they're in a similar setting by comparison.

The name seriously is that long. Wolfschanze 1944 is a 2006 WWII FPS that nobody has ever heard of, to the point that almost all documentation of it, other than my video on it, is just a copy-paste of the game's blurb. I've never seen anything past the first level in all of the research I've done on it, and the game was bugged on my computer, which made it crash and delete my saves every time I died, so it's quite possibly another uncharted territory situation. The mouse acceleration is possibly the worst I've ever seen, but the game radiates passion from the amazingly ad-hoc lip syncing and acting. The game is still available for download for $4.99 on its itch.io page at https://calaris.itch.io/wolfschanze-1944, although I've seen it go for free quite often, and if you claim it, you can keep it. I probably wouldn't drop a fiver on it, but hey, I'm not your mom. That page is also really weird because it seems extremely unprofessional in all regards, despite it being the official storefront for the game, so I guess that's an offshoot of it being foreign. Apparently the game also runs on an entirely custom engine, which is a bit strange. A sequel was also apparently developed by another developer, City Interactive, creators of such classic series as Terrorist Takedown and Battlestrike Call of Victory, games that we all know and love and know. I have yet to play it, since it's apparently only available on Deutsch Amazon in German, which you can find at https://www.amazon.de/City-Interactive-Wolfschanze-2/dp/B002TKEVKO. If you want, you can get a boxed copy for $10. I'm sure it'll make a great conversation piece. The sequel kind of looks like the outcome of importing CoD:WaW maps into Stalker, then maxing out the contrast. From what I can tell on GiantBomb, the original developers, Calaris Studios, touts a pantheon of obscure garbage, so I guess that they may have made some other, uh, things.