Yooo so steam says I have 28 hours played so here we go :

Absolutely buy this game, but wait until the first large official patch comes out. It fixes some nasty bugs that can cause save corruption.

I'm not gonna go into detail, but I feel very confident in saying that this is an excellent spiritual sequel to System Shock 2 that does so many things right that its easy to forgive a few shortcomings.

The game really is a single giant level (the space station) and gives you a ton of freedom in how you explore it. It's amazing how the layout starts to coalesce in your mind after a time, and all the proportions fit. I can already see me playing a 2nd time through with totally different skills just to see what areas I can get to in a different order etc. Great stuff.

Small things like the fact that every human on the station is a real person who has (or had) a function on the crew. You can track any individual from a security console and go find them (alive or dead). This doesn't sound like a big deal but as you go through the game you are reading all these emails and audiologs etc and you start to piece together this giant jigaw puzzle of what everyone on the station was doing before the game started. It all starts to fit together and you can then form a better opinion of both yourself and others and act accordingly.

The GLOO gun is cool as shit. In fact, most of the guns are good.

Err yeah, this actually got long. Game is good. Definitely buy it. Wait for patch. Bye. 

GOG is giving away Eador: Genesis, a turn-based fantasy strategy game, for free. As of this writing the offer is good for 29 hours.

https://www.gog.com/game/eador_genesis 

Good post. Does the boxy clean art deco space station style actually get remotely appealing at any point? 

The Deco stuff is used mostly for the flashy parts of the station ie the main lobby, the arboretum, crew quarters etc. There are a lot of parts that are more basic sci-fi and feel kinda like the international Space Station on steroids.

I mean, the deco style is still there in these sections, but it is much more subdued. For example here is the shuttle bay (no spoilers) http://imgur.com/deiu8bL 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ifaFCh38qw 

Found myself nodding quite a lot during that 

Found myself nodding off quite a lot during that.

Looks eye-wateringly dull. 

I doubt I'd play it even if it was free. It just doesn't look like a game I'd find enjoyable.

Almost always if "roguelike" or "procedurally generated" appears in a game description, I immediately move on. 

"retro" FPS devs should give this a gander 

From that video, Strafe's visual effects and aesthetics are good. There's plenty of little touches, and the UI and the HUD are nice.

However, enemy design is poor (including their aesthetics), combat encounter design is poor, sound fx design is poor, and the levels are too blocky. The enemies reminds me of the ones in Sauerbraten, with their poor rithm and floaty movement.

The Wolfenstein 3D engine only allowed square angles. Doom's maps were explicitly designed to use lots of non-square angles, to showcase Doom's superior technology. Strafe tries to give the impression of being inspired by Doom, but its level design has much more in common with Wolfenstein 3D, using square angles everywhere.

Also, Strafe's lighting is too uniform. This may be a limitation of the random generation of levels. It's disappointing to see people comparing Strafe to Quake (which is an actual 1996 game), when Quake's lighting is all about moody settings with strongly varied lighting that gives its levels a very deep atmosphere.

My list to improve Strafe would be:
- Complete replacement of enemies, using new ones designed & coded from scratch.
- More sound effects, to give better feedback.
- Handcrafted levels 

A couple of years ago when I was looking for a new project to work on, I talked to Strafe's lead but passed because the amount of money he offered was extremely low. It was a salary that might be acceptable if you lived with your parents rent free, but way too low for a Grown Ass Man(�) with bills to pay.

I wonder if he had a hard time finding anyone because of that and just decided to do it procedurally. 

Pretty sure it was procedural from the get-go. The thing with the Icarus levels though is that they're obviously the first to have been created, have been left as is and are by far the worst levels in the game. The rest of the levels are slightly better but not by much at all. Ironic for a supposedly old-school shooter to fail the Romero rule of designing your first levels last. 

Unless they completely redesign the game from the ground up. Not gonna happen. 

It must have been really low as I said I'd do it for �16k. 

Lower than that by a pretty good margin.

Anyway, lesson to scrappy indie devs trying to make a shooter: unless you're well versed and accomplished in the ways of level design (see: Gibhard) don't assume procedural generation is going to solve all your problems.

It's as if level design is actually an important position that you should hire people with experience (even if it's mod experience) to do... 

No offence to the devs but that's good. We can forget about it and move swiftly on, with a footnote that making your OMG SO PSEUDO-RETRO FAST PACED OMGZOR fps into a pile of arse is a good warning note for others not to do it. 

I think it's fun despite its flaws. 

then you wont see a good return in quality.

I thought Strafe would have turned out better. Clearly there are lot of issues.

I really hope Gibhard turns out well, it's doing some of the same things with level generation but hopefully it has better algorithms and AI (other stuff like lighting already looks better than Strafe).

Dusk should, in theory, be the best of all the bunch since it will have properly authored levels. 

Weird, didn't they get 180k from kickstarter? I'm pretty sure the team was like 2-4 people before devolver got involved. 

is on final sale at 90% off most places because of it being made "no longer available for sale" due to music licensing issues.

It doesn't really sound as if it's a game I'd like, but for $3 I may go ahead and grab a copy from GOG. 

Alan? Rick man, thanks. 

If not for the fact that Die Hard is one of my favorite movies, that might have slipped right past me. 

Can anybody answer this question?

If a game download code bought from Amazon, Newegg, etc. (anywhere but Steam) states:

"Steam account required for game activation and installation."

After the game is installed and activated, can it be played without Steam either running or even installed on the computer?

If anyone has personal experience of this I'd like to know. Otherwise I'll probably just have to perform a $60 experiment.