Super Smash Bro’s Ultimate is still the premier Couch Co-Op game for my circle of friends. We also play the JackBox party games and occasionally Mario Party.
I genuinely don’t know what options are even available outside of Nintendo’s fence anymore.
Edit: My reading comprehension is in the garbage today. Baldurs Gate 3 and It Takes Two.
It just released late last year, and it is one of the finest puzzle games I’ve ever played. It took me around fifty hours to get the ending, and I’ve got a folder full of notes and screenshots from putting together puzzles.
Go in blind if you can, and do your best to avoid spoilers if you need to look up any puzzle solutions. This game has more depth than Outer Wilds.
Throw Void Stranger on that list. It’s a fantastic Sokoban.
I specifically mentioned both Spyro and Ty because both series have remasters available on Steam. The Spyro: Reignited Trilogy in particular is phenomenal. They did a really good job making the updated graphics look just like my nostalgic memories of the game.
Psychonauts (the original, not the sequel, though the sequel is also good) is a Summer Camp themed 3D platformer. It doesn’t quite meet your “low stakes/chill gameplay” criteria as it does have combat and mildly challenging boss fights and platforming, but it nails the rest. It’s easier than Tunic. Maybe worth checking out.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons strictly meets all the criteria listed, but it’s ultimately a tragic story. If “some kind of impact” includes leaving you in tears, check it out.
Okami is a Zelda style adventure set in feudal Japan with immaculate vibes. You play as the sun goddess Amaterasu in the form of a wolf bringing light and life to a land ravaged by demons. The world is cold and dark at first, but you bring spring and summer on your heels.
Finally, two favorites from my childhood are the Spyro series and the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series. These are 3D Platformer collectathons and neither of these series are even close to any of the examples you provided, but they are bright and colorful and in my heart they have feelings of Summer Vacation and staying home all day to play video games.
Farming? Really? Man of your talents?
That makes a lot more sense now. Thank you. I know where to look for troubleshooting next time I play.
I was not counting mana cost, no. So it’ll just drop modifiers if it doesn’t have enough mana, and still cast the base spell? That does explain some of the behavior I was seeing. I figured it would fail to cast entirely if I didn’t have enough mana for the full block.
One theory I had, if you can confirm, is that shuffle doesn’t just shuffle spells, it shuffles all spell nodes.
So if I have a 4-slot shuffle wand with: PPMP (P = Projectile Spell, M = Modifier)
I was thinking the cast table could either be:
P1 - 33%
P2 - 33%
MP3 - 33%
Or
P1 - 25%
P2 - 25%
MP3 - 25%
P3 - 25%
Depending on whether the modifier block was a valid place for the shuffle to land.
I was planning to try to build some wand experiments to differentiate which of these scenarios is true. Good to know that mana can be a confounding variable.
Edit: Also, is shuffle fully random or does it draw without replacement like a deck of cards until all stored spells are cast and it can recharge? Just thought of this and realized I hadn’t tested for it.
The issue I’ve been trying to work out is getting modifiers to work consistently. My understanding is that modifiers are supposed to stack and affect the next projectile spell to the right, but they either don’t apply at all or will apply sporadically, and I haven’t figured out what rule I’m missing.
I assume some modifiers just don’t work with some projectiles, but the game doesn’t seem to communicate whether this is the case. I also suspect it has something to do with shuffle, as you warned against, but I haven’t been getting any non-shuffle wands for experimentation, and my starter wand doesn’t have much mana to work with.
It doesn’t help that I can only experiment with builds in the airlock chambers between levels.
The specific issue I remember having last night was that I couldn’t get the pentagon shot modifier to apply to any of my projectile spells no matter what I did.
I did get the flametrail modifier working consistently, so I’m doing something right, but I’m not sure what was different between that and the pentagon spread modifier I was trying.
I’ll back up that Civ 4 has been the best entry in the series so far.
Civ 5 is when they dropped unit stacking, which made combat much slower and more finicky since you couldn’t just build up a massive deathball and tear across the map, and Civ 6 doubled down on that design space by tying city upgrades to individual tiles as well. They’re not bad changes, and they do add more strategic depth to the combat and city-building, but they do make an already slow game substantially slower, since combats that used to be done in a turn or two now require several turns of rotating and repositioning units to get them in and out of the fight.
Civ 4 was the last “pure” civ experience, building off and adding to the previous games without sweeping mechanical changes to shake up the meta.
I’ve started and bounced off Noita a couple of times already. It’s been fun but I do need time to dig in and wrap my head around the mechanics.
I’m stuck on wand building at the moment. I’ve watched a couple video guides explaining how it works, but something still isn’t clicking. None of the wands I’m making have worked the way I expect them to, and I’m not sure what I’m not understanding.
I just finished both Borderlands 3 and God of War (2018) so I’m in gaming limbo again.
Leaning toward Stardew Valley, Noita, or finally buckling down to finish Far Cry 3.
You guessed correctly.
I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.
First time I’d ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.
My Laptop will be 15 years old this year.
It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.
Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.
Still runs fine. She’s a trooper.
Nope. I can’t even tell the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz unless they’re actually running side by side.
Void Stranger, Chip’s Challenge, and BABA IS YOU are all Sokoban style puzzle games with minimal performance requirements and no need for a mouse.
Siralim Ultimate is a creature collector RPG that will run on a potato and provide endless grinding, if you’re into that.
The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters of the first six games are all excellent if you’re into JRPGs.
Dungeons of Dredmor if you like rogue-likes, or you could go old-school and pick up NetHack or ADOM.
I’ve got a similar story, but with a much more positive ending.
Was at a LARP event, camping in the woods, when a girl started having an asthma attack. She’d forgotten her inhaler, no one else had one on hand, and she was visibly turning blue as she suffocated. We called 911, but the nearest hospital was in a city several miles away and the 911 operator couldn’t locate our site to send the ambulance.
We agreed to meet the ambulance on the highway halfway, loaded up in my truck, and I booked it. Pushed my little 4-cylinder Frontier up to 115mph. Fastest I’ve ever driven. I had my hazards going and was flashing my brights like an asshole at every car I overtook. Thank fuck they all yielded to me.
We met the ambulance on the side of the road, transferred her over, and they were able to get her breathing again. She survived.
But there’s no sense crying after every mistake.
You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake.
My last foray into Linux gaming was back in the early-2010s, and I was mostly just trying to get EVE Online to run unsuccessfully. I was running a laptop that was top if the line (in 2009) and my PCs were cobbled together from old Dells and HPs donated by family and friends or retired and given away by my company IT team.
Steam on Linux was nice, and would show you which games in your library had Linux native versions to install. I held out on that and browser gamed for a while. Played a lot of Runescape and Minecraft. Taught myself to code a bit, but didn’t really get anywhere with that.
Eventually I had money and time to put together a “proper” gaming PC, and of course I put Windows on it since I wanted to get an NVidia graphics card as I’d had so much trouble with the AMD drivers on my laptop.
Ran Windows for gaming and kept Linux on the laptop since then. First PC ran Win7, which i loved. Next one ran Win 8, which I hated. Current one was running Win 10, which was meh, and I’ve only soured on it over time. Made the switch back to Linux last week after I got tired of M$ constantly asking me if I want to try Copilot on /both/ my work and personal PCs.
Proton is fucking great. Never going back. The old laptop is still running strong after 15 years. It’s got BunsenLabs installed at the moment.
Lots of little things, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the constant pop-ups asking me to try out Copilot in Win10, harassing me daily on both on my personal PC and my work laptop.
Windows has been on thin ice since the trash fire that was Win8, and I’d only stuck with it for Nvidia driver support for gaming. I’ve been watching Proton development for years now, and putting it through its paces on my older PCs every few months, so I knew I was ready to make the switch for about a year before I finally pulled the trigger. I justified putting it off with the thought that “I can build my next PC around an AMD graphics card amd make the switch then.”
Then Win11 and all its garbage was announced, AI took off, and Microsoft started pushing their slop on my machine harder than ever. It was too much. I switched to Mint DE on my current machine and haven’t looked back.