I saw this thread and thought as I clicked, "I wonder if anyone's posted.. oh, good."
ErisShrugged
You've got some moderately highbrow and transhumanist stuff in there; have you tried Greg Egan? The two starting places I like to recommend are the Clockwork Rocket books (natives of a universe with alternate physics explore it and figure out what's going on, kind of Flatland turned up to 11.. and then up to 121..), and Permutation City which I think will meet your "some very interesting ideas" and then keep accelerating.
Does the cult have a good plan for healthcare? If so, please send me your newsletter, manifesto, religious tract, pentabarf, whatever.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is pretty astounding, offering an incredible level of detail and degree of freedom, plus just lots of zombies to fight.
Hey again, you'll probably need a minute to remember making this post, but I saw Intergalactic Fishing was on sale in the Steam Summer Sale, so I went ahead and bought a copy. This lives up to everything you've said - I very much enjoy the gameplay of messing with the lure puzzle minigame and collecting information on all the fish in any given lake, and I'm absolutely wanting to catch Just One More Fish.
...I guess I'm hooked.
Thanks again!
I use my Deck in desktop mode a lot of the time, but let's go with games I just play with it in handheld mode, since my list seems to be different.
- Siralim Ultimate
- Chronicon
- Demon's Tilt
- Satryn Deluxe
- Stellaris
- Vampire Survivors
- Time Break Chronicles
I finished Overload this weekend, so I'm wandering through my backlog looking for a next thing that sticks with me for more than five minutes. Oxygen Not Included doesn't seem to be cutting it, so.. we'll see. I've got Cataclysm: DDA around as a light diversion until I get pulled into something, and there's always Guild Wars 2 and Deep Rock Galactic.
I love the last additional arrow at the bottom on the excessively-signed post.
What else is good in this area?
At least bookmarked; I just have to give this a try!
I'm not sure Siralim Ultimate qualifies as "underrated", but it's the kind of game where if the idea resonates with you it'll keep you happily busy forever. It's often compared to a Pokemon game, but I think it's better described as Pokemon meets a dungeon blobber.
At its core, you build a group of six creatures and go into a procedural dungeon where you will fight other groups of similar creatures, picking options like fighting and casting spells. The creatures each have special traits which change game rules for them, and your job is to take advantage of this so that you win these fights. Your character also has perks which act as additional modifiers, and fusing creatures and slapping artifacts on them means you can apply even more changes to how everything works.
The interesting part emerges from the fact that these traits are generally not modifiers like +3.5% damage on Tuesdays; they are instead drastic and game-warping options like "If this creature successfully attacks, there's a 50% chance that a dead creature on its team is resurrected." That by itself is kind of hugely impactful.. and it's also kind of basic and boring for Siralim. Now let's fuse it with a monster that immediately gets a free attack if the enemy attacks any other monster on your team, now we're starting to cook.
Your actual goal isn't to play fair, it is to fold, spindle, and mutilate the game's mechanics to allow your team to win in increasingly unfair and ridiculous fights. It's also pretty good at letting you control your level of challenge, incidentally, but you are at some point going to have to win against enemies with their own completely bonkers tricks. If you enjoy figuring out how to warp complicated rules to your benefit and stack absurdity atop absurdity, this game is calling for you. It's absolutely got indie jank, by the way - the graphics aren't amazing, the game sometimes grinds along very slowly processing all the silliness, and while it has lots of reference material ingame there's still just way too much information to take in.
You've also got their coverage of the 2016 election, where it's a matter of settled fact that they slept on an FBI investigation of Trump for things we now know actually happened while putting Clinton's emails on the front page at every opportunity.
You've also got them giving a platform to dreck like this - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/immigration-stephen-miller.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur - which includes lovely bits like "The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is near a record high, and increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics."
I'm not one of those people who has accumulated an entire drawer full of examples and is able to provide you with 400 bullet points of what's wrong with the NYT, but maybe two more will help push you to investigate a bit more? The NYT may publish left-leaning content sometimes, but they are not an actual ally of the Democrats, let alone the progressive or far left. They routinely publish Republican lies uncritically, and their perception as left-leaning is one of their best weapons.