Steam/PC Mega Thread 2024

[Naitch]

Has anyone played Marvel's Midnight Suns? It's currently on sale as part of the 2K sale and I'm intrigued by the concept. Turn based strategy using Marvel characters sounds like Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, which was an awesome game.

[Ruki]

13 minutes ago, Naitch said:

Has anyone played Marvel's Midnight Suns? It's currently on sale as part of the 2K sale and I'm intrigued by the concept. Turn based strategy using Marvel characters sounds like Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, which was an awesome game.

I did! Played it to completion last year. Was a lot of fun.

[JasonM]

I actually finished it two weeks ago. It was great fun, and managed to hold my attention all the way through.

It can become slightly tedious at times, but it just worked for me and being able to fight and hang out with some of my favorite Marvel characters is a blast.

The balancing is quite well done, and all the characters have their own way of playing, too. Some are obviously better than others (late game Magik and Ghost Rider are obscene), but you rarely feel required to run certain parties to get through it.

The friendship system feels a bit Fire Emblem-y, but once i realised that it only sold me further.

[GhostMachine]

As a promotion when the game came out, they actually did a Forged In Fire episode where the contestants had to forge weapons from the game.

[Ruki]

This stupid card game, I switch most of my cards to Spades, and guess what comes up....

 

 

[Lint]

A 'review' of Balatro from one of the writers at Defector
 

Quote

 

I told myself last week that I wasn't going to buy Balatro. I had acquired a Nintendo Switch over Christmas (did you know that a Switch is actually $300 and not $1000, and please do not ask how I went six years believing that second part) and it did terrible things to my video game purchases, like enabling a suite of games, Balatro included, that I otherwise would not be able to play as a certified MacBook Air gamer. But I was not going to buy Balatro while I was in the middle of three other games. I was going to wait for more reviews to roll in or a sale or even a MacOS release, and then I would consider it.

In Balatro, you start with a standard deck of 52 playing cards. Your goal each round (or blind) is to score a certain number of points within a limited number of played hands and discards. There are eight antes, and each ante has three blinds (the small blind, large blind, and boss blind: your classic poker line-up). The points goal increases each subsequent round while your hands and discards stay stagnant—but beat a blind, and you earn a bit of cash and access to a store full of cards that can modify your deck; skip a blind, and you forsake immediate improvement for future benefits.

An incomplete list of possible cards you can get in Balatro: planet cards that increase the base points value of poker hands; tarot cards that can add, delete, duplicate, change the suits of, and otherwise improve cards; vouchers that can improve your economy or increase your hands and discards per round; and a suite of 150 joker cards that do basically anything, from providing extra cash to allowing you to make flushes and straights with only four cards. You can play some totally real poker hands like five-of-a-kind and a flush house. A joker card named Jimbo walks you through the tutorial and then mocks you if you fail. It's a brilliant, well-crafted game, and has clever art and a banging soundtrack to boot.

Anyway, I lasted approximately half a day because I am a sucker for roguelike games—Hades, Slay the Spire, Inscryption, even the Simulated Universe portion of Honkai: Star Rail, may all gacha gamers eventually find peace—and Balatro was a poker roguelike deckbuilder, which is a specific combination of words that will cause a specific population of gamers to start frothing at the mouth. I bought the game and played until midnight. Baseball spring training started, so I put on the first televised Phillies game and played Balatro. Over the weekend, a friend called to ask me if I wanted to get bubble tea and then malatang, and I nearly turned them down because I was playing Balatro. The Switch currently prioritizes telling me that I got Balatro seven days ago, rather than my hours played—this is a good thing, because it means that I don't have to face my true self for at least a little while longer.

After all this time, would I describe myself as being "good" at "the game?" No. I get tunnel vision and try to force a flush build almost every single run. Sometimes I'm too lazy to check the cards remaining in the deck so I try to discard for a full house that doesn't exist. I overconfidently skip blinds even if it basically makes it impossible for me to beat the boss blind. The Balatro stats page reveals some respectable things, like how my highest ante in endless mode is 12, and some less respectable things, like how my best win streak is 2, and some unsurprising things, like how my most played hand is flushes. I've hit a hand worth 45 million points before, and then I immediately fumbled with the controls and sold a still-scaling joker card that was giving me a 3x buff to my score. I will never have the mental overhead required to enter the scientific notation zone of single-hand scoring.

This would be unfun in most genres of video game, but roguelikes are built to reward failure. After all, there is no real end—once you beat the eighth ante on a deck of cards, a harder mode unlocks for that deck. If you beat the hardest mode available, there are still other decks to complete. If you beat that, then there's always endless mode. It's perhaps unsurprising that I enjoy iterative processes, but this Samuel Beckett–ass genre of video game explains why and how I have 216.9 hours in Slay the Spire while, again, not being very good. I'm loath to search up the most powerful deck build, not because I want to discover it on my own (again with the mental overhead: I doubt I'll ever be able to) but because that would suck a lot of the joy out of my experience. Throwing bananas at the wall and seeing what sticks is rewarding. It has to be, because you'll fail a lot—the only hope is that the next time, you'll fail better. I want to win, but more than that, I want to play, and with 150 jokers in the game, there are infinite ways to play. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go boot up the game and play another flush deck.

 

 

[jrhodes]

I bought Balatro last night after seeing the buzz.

I'm not normally into deck-builders or roguelikes but I downloaded Balatro at 9pm and stayed up until 2am playing it.

Only got as far as ante 7 but just one more go and I'll win...

[RPS]

7 hours ago, jrhodes said:

I bought Balatro last night after seeing the buzz.

I'm not normally into deck-builders or roguelikes but I downloaded Balatro at 9pm and stayed up until 2am playing it.

Only got as far as ante 7 but just one more go and I'll win...

One more hand..... 

[Lint]

7 hours ago, jrhodes said:

I bought Balatro last night after seeing the buzz.

I'm not normally into deck-builders or roguelikes but I downloaded Balatro at 9pm and stayed up until 2am playing it.

Only got as far as ante 7 but just one more go and I'll win...

I bought it at like 1am and quickly quit because I realized I'd be playing it until the sun came up

[Ruki]

I was so close to winning my very first run! I was 19k chips short. So close

[GhostMachine]

The only card game I'm playing on Steam is Marvel Snap, and I have 2 different accounts. 

[Ruki]

3 hours ago, Ruki said:

I was so close to winning my very first run! I was 19k chips short. So close

Got to Ante 8 again... this time I was on a heater. THen the last one was a Very Large Blind. I got 182k/300k.

 

Ugh!!!

[Lint]

God this game is feeding my gambling addiction but not putting me into crippling debt

[apsham]

8 hours ago, Ruki said:

Got to Ante 8 again... this time I was on a heater. THen the last one was a Very Large Blind. I got 182k/300k.

 

Ugh!!!

This is exactly what happened to me last night. I had levelled up Full House to Lvl. 10 but I just didn't have the Jokes that would get me that high.

[jrhodes]

Won three runs yesterday while I was waiting for FFVII Rebirth to drop.

Two of the wins centered around getting three of a kind or even just pairs or high cards. Got some jokers that really boosted those hands.

The other win was a struggle until ante six where I got a x3 multiplier (rather than the typical + multiplier) joker. At that point it became a cakewalk.

I've been watching a few people play on YouTube though and have no clue how they're stacking eight or nine jokers, all with multiple abilities on them. 

[Ruki]

My favorite yesterday was a Joker that treated all cards as face cards and all face cards gave +4 mult

[apsham]

I had that combo once, was very nice! I miss the rare Joker I got once - it was the Banana one that gave you a big multiplier but it has a 1/4 chance of breaking when you use it - except it was a larger multiplier and something like 1/1000 chance of breaking or something like that.

[TheWho87]

Space Crew: Legendary Edition is free to keep on Steam till March 14th.

[Owen]

On 29/02/2024 at 14:57, apsham said:

I had that combo once, was very nice! I miss the rare Joker I got once - it was the Banana one that gave you a big multiplier but it has a 1/4 chance of breaking when you use it - except it was a larger multiplier and something like 1/1000 chance of breaking or something like that.

That one's great. Maybe my favourite card. If you aren't aware (minor spoilers for how to obtain it again in the future)...

Spoiler

that comes up in the shop if you buy the original banana (Gros Michel) and it gets destroyed due to the 1/4 chance of breaking.

 

[apsham]

45 minutes ago, Owen said:

That one's great. Maybe my favourite card. If you aren't aware (minor spoilers for how to obtain it again in the future)...

  Reveal hidden contents

that comes up in the shop if you buy the original banana (Gros Michel) and it gets destroyed due to the 1/4 chance of breaking.

 

Spoiler

Oh god!  That's good to know, sometimes I skip it because it isn't the right one.

Does the blank voucher do anything? I always buy it when I have extra cash.