hyretic

Multiple ads per show, a Patreon that is making over double the amount you wanted to cover costs, and now paid shout-outs as well? When is enough enough guys?

Anyone who logged into Steam today would have struggled to miss the big Greenlight banner. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a new avenue for indie developers to submit their games to Steam. Users vote for what they'd like to see become available and the popular ones are then judged by Valve. Here's more info. I'm all in favour of this idea in theory. I'm looking forward to more indie games on Steam. In practice however, there's a clear problem; there are so many games submitted that it's impossible to be able to look through them all to judge them on their own merits. So I thought it would be good to have a thread where we can come to find interesting games people have highlighted. I have a couple to start with. Towns - A fun game I bought around six months ago. It's still in alpha, but more in the 'being improved all the time' than the 'this isn't even a game yet' category. You start with a group of townsfolk who you have no direct control over, you just set tasks and watch them scurry around to complete them. You build houses and roads, make sure they have enough food, and tool them up with weapons and armour to explore the underground dungeons. It's unlikely to make a huge impression on the gaming world, but it deserves the wider audience Steam might give it. Worth an upvote. Receiver - An experimental FPS from Wolfire Games - the guys behind the Humble Bundles, Lugaru and Overgrowth. It's was created for the 7-day FPS challenge, so it doesn't have a huge amount of content, but rather focuses on showing a different perspective of the genre. The player possesses a single pistol which is a seemingly fully realised version of it's real life counterpart (the gun, magazine and rounds can all be manipulated independently of one another). The architecture of the level itself is constant, but your spawn point, as well as the enemies, ammo and collectables are all randomly placed, so no two play-throughs will go exactly the same. There have been several updates to the game since the 7 day competition ended, but I'm not really sure how much Wolfire plan to work on the game. I think their focus will still be on Overgrowth. I'm not sure how Valve will feel about a bare-bones game like this, but I'm hoping the unique aspects of it will win over in the end.

Wow. I can't pretend it's not pretty gutting that my favourite host was dropped for that reason, but I appreciate you explaining the situation anyway Chris.

I thought the same thing prior to his tweet, but that seems to indicate it's not a personal issue but a podcast quality issue, and I think the readers' opinion on that is valid. Besides, he's perfectly capable of ignoring this if he wants to. I don't think we're hurting anyone by showing that we actually care that he isn't on the podcast anymore.

Sean just posted this on Twitter. I really miss him being on the podcast, but I thought chances are he wasn't on it because he just plain didn't want to be on it anymore. However, he seems to think that the show is better without him and that's just so wrong. Let's see what the readers feel like. Strawpoll.

Does Sean still exist? It seems like so long since he was on an episode and I can't remember his absence ever being mentioned. I'm starting to think he was a figment of my imagination.

Am I missing something? What changed?

I'd love to see that on a livestream. It's quite entertaining to watch a complete beginner fail to make it to space. 37 revisions of their rocket later and they start to understand how it works.

I wasn't expecting this thread to end up so depressing, lol. Have anyone had a good experience with Greenlight? Found an interesting game on there maybe?

2015 Year of the PS3 Countdown to tears finally ends Sean finally gets his helicopter in DayZ

I have a 75% off Portal 2 coupon that I have no use for. I'm sure most people who are interested in Portal 2 already have it or already have a friend with this coupon, but if anyone wants it, just message me on Steam. http://steamcommunity.com/id/hyretic

I think Jonathan Blow's fame can be attributed to the fact that he loves to talk more than anything else. He's a journalist's dream. The people who are still famous without keeping up a stream of public dialogue would probably be more deserving of that title.

I've completed the main game and the DLC now. I think I liked it, but it definitely had issues. It's very hard to have that nuanced movement, which a lot of games don't have, but a game like this requires the movement to be spot on for the jumping puzzles. The game is very hard to play with a 360 controller, but the dimensional shift buttons seem like they were designed for those shoulder buttons. I found it quite difficult with the default keyboard bindings of Q, E, 1 and 3. Some of the puzzles seemed a lot more unforgiving than the Portal ones too. It's not enough to solve the puzzle, you then have to repeat it until you have the rhythm down. All that said, the dimension mechanics are a lot of fun to play around with. The puzzles in the game maybe didn't quite take advantage of them all the time, but there's a lot of potential there. I also really loved how the game looked and sounded. The endless similar hallways and repeated chatter from the professor didn't bother me much at all. I think if you're a fan of the Portal games and you want to play something similar, you should pick this up. Just don't expect it to be as polished as Portal. If you're referring to the part I'm thinking of, you do need quite a bit of patience for it. It's one of those puzzles that's simple to solve, but frustrating to master.

I imagine this might have been posted on here before, but I've just seen it on Imgur.

Anyone else been playing this? It was released yesterday on Steam for £12 / $15. It plays basically exactly the same as the original, just with new maps, new traps, new weapons and new enemies. Online co-op is included this time too. I've played about halfway through the campaign on single player and I'm enjoying it. It's tough though, even for someone playing the first game right up until yesterday, so I imagine it would be very hard for a new player. The difficulty is kinda part of it's charm though. It's difficult in a challenging way rather than a frustrating way. If you played the original and liked it, you should definitely pick this up. If you're completely new to it, I would suggest playing OMD1 first before jumping into this.

The co-op thing isn't such a big issue for me. I'll probably play a bit with my girlfriend but if it hadn't have had that feature I'd have still bought it day one anyway. If you own OMD1 on steam, you get 10 of those levels available in OMD2 for co-op, so it's still worth having if you see it at 75% off. One con I forgot to mention in the opening post, the sequel only has 15 levels compared to 24 in the original. There is more incentive for replaying levels now though.

I missed at least one of the community votes, but I still got the 'vote everyday' thing.

Since the sale is pretty much finished now, what did everyone buy? £1.73 - Binding of Isaac bundle 75% off £3.74 - Orcs Must Die! GOTY 75% off £1.74 - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 75% off £1.49 - Hitman: Blood Money 75% off £3.24 - Mirror's Edge 75% off £4.99 - Grand Theft Auto complete pack 75% off £1.99 - Burnout Paradise 80% off £3.39 - Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY 66% off £1.49 - Garry's Mod 75% off £23.80 in total I was expecting to spend more, but quite a few things on my list never showed up. Probably a good thing.

I don't believe there is a correct answer when it comes to morality. Everyone is going to feel differently about every moral issue. That said, I don't think this (relatively) sudden wave of vegetarian ethics is going to convince the majority of people about something that was never an issue throughout our entire history. I'm not 'deferring purely to historical beliefs', that's just one point I made. I feel a lot more strongly about the fact that most animals are going to endure some sort of gruesome death out in the wild regardless.

As far as I know, people have always considered murder wrong. Ethics regarding eating meat seems to be something that has only existed (at least on a big enough scale) in very recent history. I could well be totally wrong about that. I'm not claiming to be educated on the subject, that's just my impression of it.

I like animals as much as the next guy, but I have no qualms about eating meat at all. We live in a world that thrives on creatures killing and eating each other. Some people expect us to be held to a higher standard, that we're better than that, but it's something our species has done for thousands of generations and I don't think we can just now decide that it's wrong. I hate the thought of animals being treated badly just because it's more convenient, but while I wouldn't like to be the guy holding the cleaver, I don't think there's anything unethical about killing them for food. Hunting for sport seems a bit unreasonable though.

Super Meat Boy is definitely worth it if you don't have it.

I picked that up. I've always felt annoyed with myself that I never completed the story missions for III or VC. Played six hours of III so far and I'm really enjoying it. The HQ textures mod makes the game look really good.

Haha, yeah, I've seen that. Steam has gone fairly easy on my wallet really. Easier than I was expecting.

The sequel isn't bad, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the first game. It seemed a bit rushed and just ended up being pretty unmemorable.