Recent reviews by Robert

Chill, but with strategy.

Dicey Dungeons is the most strategic rogue-like game I've played. You frequently get to choose good strategies for bad rolls. It's not just about rolling 6es every turn, it's about using your abilities and items. The difficulty curve is perfect, with little knowledge you can beat the first boss with the first die, with an OP special ability of re-rolling up to 3 dice. More advanced play requires a good harmony between abilities, and having an adaptable strategy.

Beautiful and educational.

I was a complete car novice. But after playing this game I am able to at least understand where the parts are located. And not be afraid of looking in and fixing my real-world car when things go wrong.

The depth is very good, best out of all the games I've played where you can change car parts. But when I got a flat in the real world, and I broke off a stud, I didn't realize that in the real world you can spend $7 on a new stud instead of $100 on a new hub. So not that amount of detail. But really good considering.

It's too bad the trailer shows a guy doing body work, welding and sanding down the side panels. That doesn't happen in this game. In CMS 2018, near the endgame, you can finally fix panels instantly at the repair table.

Which reminds me that the skill progression tree is totally out of whack. I think the player should be able to choose what they want to learn next, rather than have to wait until they get to a certain level to be able to paint a car. IMHO using money to buy a paint room, or each of the tools, would be better than a linear skill tree like this game has.

However this game was instrumental in the line of games that got me interested in cars. Namely:
RevHeads -> Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 -> Forza Horizon 4
Now I'm watching Donut Media on YouTube and complaining to my wife when someone bought an Audi R8 and replaced the magride shocks with standard ones. And this game had a big role in that progression. (Even though CMS2018 also doesn't have a difference between normal and magride shocks)

The humor in this game has stood the test of time. I enjoy showing this game to people that haven't played it and hearing all the hilarious passive-aggressiveness. My friend introduced this game to me, it's the reason I got a Steam account years ago. It felt like a hidden gem in the Orange Box. It got me interested in Jonathan Coulton's music. And brought me back into PC gaming.

It's just a kitchen. It has 3 colors. You can grab a frying pan and turn on the stove. And you can throw away or "cook" food. There is nothing else in here.

Obvious things that I expected, like maybe the IKEA product number or model name of the items in the kitchen are not there. The IKEA kitchen planner website app is at least 100 times more interesting, in that thing you can at least choose what stuff you want and where you want to put it, and that web kitchen planner app is not good either. That's how bad this VR "experience" is.

My expectations were low. I was only expecting to be able to go to a few rooms and see some IKEA stuff. Maybe a kitchen, bedroom, and a living room. Yet even with low expectations this experience still disappointed me.

This is by far the best game in VR right now. Most other VR games shouldn't even call themselves games. Job Simulator, this is a game. This is how it's supposed to be done.

It's funny. It's surprising and emergent. It looks good. The controls are great. There are secret things to find. There are modifiers to try playing again. The songs great too.

It has less content than say Octodad or Surgeon Simulator. But just one of the 4 jobs has much more content than most of the VR games I've tried. So yes, this game needs more content, but comparing it to the filth they're charging for in the "Virtual Reality" category here on Steam, Job Simulator is awesome.

This series of demos individually have as much content as a typical VR game on Steam today. Sad for those games, but honestly, The Lab's games are really fun. I've tried Holopoint and The Lab's Longbow game, The Lab is more fun. At work we are all competing to see how many waves we can conquer. The Arcade game is fun. The Portal robot repair thing is surprising and incredible looking. The sling shot is hilarious, and the textures and modeling of the cores is fantastic. This is one of the best things in VR right now.

This is a psychological art piece. If you enjoy reviewing games, or talking about what games mean, you may enjoy this. This is not a funny game. I believe the main point is to make you feel a certain way, and then have a twist to make you feel some other thing. Somewhat like a psychological-thriller movie, but more like listening to critics explain a completely red canvas in an art museum. If you're looking for that kind of experince, you should get this game.

If you will be offended that there are only two hours of content, then you should not get this game. (You should stop going to the movies too.) But even though I don't enjoy the feeling this game left me to consider, I appreciate that this game exists. Art doesn't need to make you feel happy, but just feel something. And therefore I believe it does deserve the $10 I paid for it.

Why did I not enjoy this game, but still recommend it? Because I thought the narrator was too pretentious. And I didn't enjoy the ending because I felt cheated. But I do enjoy reading people analyzing this game in the same way that the narrator analyazes the games within the game. And I'd love more games like this to exist than clones of Minecraft, Bejeweled, or another zombie game.

Blender is a free, and open-source, modeling, sculpting, and texturing tool. It also has an NLE video editor. Blender is not only free, it's sometimes better than enormously priced things like Maya.

For example, Blender has a mirror modifier, in Maya you have to make a copy, invert the mesh on some axis, and then when you're done combine the models. Blender's keyboard controls allow you to be quickly more precise than Maya which is very helpful when modeling modular assets or hard surfaces. Blender has no limit on the number of polys that can be in an export. Maya's good baking options are not in LT, you can bake with any of the latest Blender versions in the last few years. Maya's LT file format is not openable by the Pro version of Maya. So if you made a bunch of assets in LT, and then you switch to real Maya you'll have to export them to FBX and re-import them.

Blender isn't prefect. The image editor is not a replacement for Photoshop, you can't easily paint on a specific channel, use layers, etc... The right click to select, left click to place cursor defaults are hard to get used to, you can change the default, but really good Blender modelers use the cursor well. The PBR workflow is not good, even though Blender uses GLSL the Blender team has yet to use PBR shaders. You're often better off exporting the mesh to Substance Painter and going from there. Or just "rendering" in Unreal Engine.

Blender is a small quick download, so I can download it on a off-site job's computer and use it without licencing concerns.

Blender is the VIM editor of the 3D art world. It's a steep learning curve but worth it. Blender masters are extremely quick.

Got this game pretty early, and it was fun. But then I recently came back to it and wow it has improved.

It's like an open universe survival game, with cool objectives. This is what I wanted in Minecraft's "Adventure" update. There are missions where you can't just dig your way around the guys.

There are still a few minor issues, like consistency in language. For example NPCs say you've been given a nano-suit, but it doesn't show up in your inventory, however they really mean you can now add an O2 upgrade using your ship's computer. However some of the missions are surprising and creative. The bosses are a bit too platformy for my tastes, but beating them without cheating was ever-so satisfying.

And now that I've unlocked wiring, even more engineering goodness.