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Video game thread.
Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.
Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.
Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.
Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.
That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.
The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.
I tried out Forza Horizon 6. It's sorta impressive graphically, and sorta isn't. The water in particular does not hold up to whatever you might expect from "Extreme + RT" settings in 2026.
Despite being set in Japan, there's no real exoticism. The franchise is as bland and globalized-homogenized as almost anything could be. I like the idea of driving around Japan, but it's hard to get a moment's respite from the shitty vanilla layer that covers everything. It's very very "safe". I suspect it's made for the sort of teenager who needs her parents' approval of the game to get them to buy it for her. The whole "Horizon Festival" gimmick bores the shit out of me. The characters, if you can call them that, all suck so far. I wish I could just drive around Japan and race without these characters and gimmicks chiming in constantly.
Then I returned to Slay the Spire 2. I've beaten Ascension 2 and Ascension 1 a few times over the last few days with various characters. I'm still not very good at the game (it's very much knowledge based) but I'm winning half of my runs now. When I started out I needed like 40 runs just to get my first win.
Forza fans have been begging for Japan for years now. The new game looks somewhat interesting, but I'm particularly annoyed by how they made Japanese roads to American highway standards. They're way too wide, and I think newer racing games strongly underweight how having at least some narrow track adds to a visceral sense of speed. Last Forza game I genuinely enjoyed was 3, 4 annoyed me because I couldn't run over the sheep, and 5 was just a new coat of paint.
To be fair, so is 6. It's the Place Japan meme incarnate, but the series has clearly settled into a rhythm, and one that's appealing to many. I can tell you the series absolutely murdered NFS, which was my childhood. I would have absolutely loved a simcade alternative at the time, now I don't particularly care.
I might just suck at the game; I seem to find them a bit narrower than 5's. Then again, 5's set in the fictional Dei region of Mexico, and them not being able to afford paint, or more than 3 roads and one mountain, is realistic I guess. You can't run over the cows in 6 either, which is unfortunate; gone are the days of secret minigames in benchmarking programs where you could shoot down flying cows with a missile launcher mounted on the back of your monster truck (which, annoyingly, I can't find any good footage of, though you can see the aftermath of it here).
NFS Heat was very good but I haven't heard much out of them lately (I know they made a new game but I also know nothing about it). Hey, at least the AI cheats as hard as it did in those games, so you too can experience the classics, like picking a 3000 HP drag car and losing to a Beat.
Which was funny, but come on.
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