The Contortionist. It’s been a long 6 years since Clairvoyant.

Funnily enough CS1 has seen an uptick in players recently. It surpassed CS2’s daily player count. The 24 hour peak is almost 4000 more than CS2 yesterday. 10k to 6k rounding up.

Let me be clear, I don’t wish for this game to die. CS1 is my most played game of the last decade. I really wanted CS2 to be that going forward. Before Cities Skylines, the game I’ve put the most time into in my life was SimCity 4. When Sim City 2013 came along I thought just like you that there’s no way that one of the most beloved video games series of all time crumble like this.

Reality is CS2 has just as much a chance to be abandoned as SC13. It really hinges on what they do next. If it’s not a bug fix or mod support they’re doomed. If they really start pushing DLC and tie bug fixes to that, the message is clear. They don’t care about the quality of the game and it’s just another cash cow. And let’s be crystal clear. Since Paradox went public this game lasting will be more dependent on what sales look like going forward. We’ve already seen cracks in that when Paradox released their investor call and showed disappointment in CS2’s post launch performance. That will kill this game.

Ultimately this game can die not because they decided to stop working on it or Paradox breaks from CO. It will die because nobody will want to support it. It will die because modders will abandon it and move on. Investors can pressure them to leave it behind. The community that supports it will leave. A game like this thrives with a community behind it. If that community decides to abandon it, then this game will fade away despite CO/Paradox’s efforts to keep it afloat.

Everybody is looking at this game like it’s the next No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. That blind hope is great if you like the game, but to everybody else this has the same chance to be Cities XL, or worse Sim City 2013.

Have you been paying attention to the drama surrounding the game and behind the scenes at CO? I’m not gonna recap it in full but it paints a dire picture for the game’s future. CO admits the game is in a broken state then flip flops on how they’re gonna fix it. They’ve entered crisis PR mode and have gone through the rigamarole of blaming the fan base for being toxic, saying the simulation is working as intended, moving goal posts in their roadmap, to abandoning it all together, to nearly ceasing all communication with the community, to openly admitting that Paradox called them to keep up the weekly dev talks against their will. This is a panicked dev studio.

In the actual game, we’ve figured out that almost none of the simulation is working as intended. It’s so bad we’re at the point where one of the code modders came out and shamed/corrected CO with actual math errors he found in the code on the CS2 forums. We know they’re sitting on 2000+ assets and can’t put them in the game because their own asset importer is somehow broken. Modding is months away and the longer it takes the more this game will exit the zeitgeist. People are already leaving in droves. Just check the Steam charts.

Does this game have the potential to turn around. Yes. Do I trust Collosal Order to keep this ship from sinking. No, not anymore. Whatever good will they had, they burned through it in a matter of weeks with these last few Word of the Weeks. We’ve been around the block with botched game launches a lot recently. Especially this year. This is one of the rare ones where the fundamentals of the game are so broken it might not be salvageable. The lack of meaningful communication and action from CO has eroded all trust. The communication we have gotten from them has shot themselves in the foot more than quell any animosity stirring in the community. After only a handful of patches they’ve already dumped the road map and tied bug fixes to DLC. WHICH NOBODY SHOULD BUY after the way they’ve handled this game. I don’t care how much potential the base game has. It all comes down to modding support. And if all signals from CO are we’re struggling with our own code to the point where features that were days to weeks away are pushed back to almost a year, this game isn’t gonna survive. This isn’t just some half in the bag stripped down sequel that Paradox developed to be a DLC cow. This is a fundamentally broken game. By CO’s own word this game is a mess. They shit on the grave of SimCity with CS1 only to tempt the fate of Maxis with CS2.

D4, Starfield, Cities Skylines 2, and Mortal Combat 1. D4 and Starfield are self explanatory. CS2 is my biggest disappointment in years. Paradox killed whatever good will it had left by forcing the demise of CO. Under no circumstances should CS2 released this year. There’s no mods. It doesn’t function in any meaningful way. It’s a performance nightmare. CS1 danced on the grave of SimCity and committed all the same sins a decade later. Don’t listen to anybody that says the game has potential. They’re sitting on 2000+ assets they can’t release because they can’t import buildings into their own city building game post release. That’s how bad it is. Cities Skylines 2 was dead on arrival and it took the community 4 months to realize it.

MC1 isn’t worthy of the K. It’s just a slog. I don’t know how much they fixed it but that doesn’t break the fact that cameos are a major turnoff. Or that it has the worse progression system of recent MK games. Or that it’s sitting on potentially one of the biggest rosters MK ever had but culled itself in half by reserving half the characters for cameos. Tekken 8 and SF6 have lapped MK hard this generation. Hell even Strive and DBFZ have taken steps to stay more relevant than MK1.

And you know what the kicker is? I bought all these games at the same time. I’ve been playing the clip of Totalbicsuit singing we don’t pre-order games a lot lately.

Yeah! I always called it Hand of Manos for some reason. I had no clue there was a MST3K episode about it.

Hand of Manos. Most likely thee worst movie ever made. I found it for a screen writing class. The assignment was watch a bad movie then present it to the class. Easiest A+ of my fucking life.

Another weird one is, there used to be a sex Tetris type game for Windows 98 or earlier. Little naked people would drop down and when you got a full line they would jump off the screen. I don’t know how that got on the family PC, but it was on it. I played it. So there’s that.

I don’t know. That’s just what everybody in my neighborhood calls it.

Green Belt

Wargaming. It’s given me a social life. I’ve developed new skills like painting. It has side hobbies like 3d printing. Hopefully I can make it a career too. I’ve always dabbled with 3d software like Blender. Three months ago I took the leap to learning 3d sculpting with the plan to release my own designs for miniatures. I really wanna make my own Dark Elves for The Old World.

Same but only because I dual boot Windows and was too lazy to setup grub or systemd-boot the day I installed Linux on my new setup.

This is key. A decade ago I did all three days at the New England Metal and Hardcore festival. Bodies fell from the sky on me. I got punched in the back of the head. I was almost knocked out on multiple occasions. I lost my glasses and was blind for most of the trip. What hurt the most was my feet. The pain was only alleviated when I was running around in the pit and walking back to my motel. I was in my early 20s then. I can’t imagine doing that now.

I’m on a Ryzen 7700x with 32gb or ram and a rx5700xt GPU. I average about 25fps on low to medium settings at 1440p. It’s not the best, but it’s playable.

Performance issues aside, it’s a much better city management game than CS1. The progression system is fantastic. There’s a lot to learn when growing your city. The wonderful part is you can really go at your own pace. I got a 15k pop city and barely touched some of the mid game tech yet. It’s not forcing me to upgrade like my city will come to a halt. It really is the best combination of management and city building we’ve had since SimCity4.

That being said there are some sore spots. Maps with bumpy terrain are a pain in the ass. It feels like I’ve done more terraforming in 10 hours of CS2 than 500 I clocked in CS1. That’s how ridiculous the terrain system can be. I have no clue what they were thinking making the terrain so janky in this game. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not game breaking. It’s more of an inconvenience. Like I have to spend meaningful time terraforming large chunks of the map to get good land. Even after that it still comes out janky. To my understanding it’s all about the map. Like maps added later in development were flatter and I picked one of the rough early maps. It’s still a jank system.The way buildings lay on terrain abd morphs the land is bad and needs to be looked at.

As good as the road tools are, they’re finicky. It’s probably because I don’t have the muscle memory for it yet, but I spend a lot of time micro moving roads into place to get the right connection. The node based system is great, but takes some getting used to.

Balance seems off to me. My industry demand is always on max. I’ll build out an area and it goes away just to pop right back to max once the new buildings are running. Then I look at the numbers and they don’t make sense. 10 workers for a factory is way to little. I end up having whole neighborhoods of nothing but factories. It’s annoying. When in reality there might be a few factories here and there, they each employ thousands of people and take up little space. Where as this game has you building full factory cities because each building employs no more than 20 people. It’s another thing that needs to be adjusted imo.

Those are the only things I have to complain about the game so far. During my first extended playthrough I thought it really felt like SimCity4. I was blasting the SC4 soundtrack when playing it, but the progression system felt familiar. It adds so much to the game. It gives you a sense of accomplishment when you see your work means something. And there’s a lot of levels a city can reach. There’s always gonna be something to work towards. Performance wise, it could be better. Hopefully it gets sorted out in the coming months.

City builders have always been the type of games where once you get sick of the soundtrack, you put on your own music. I’ve barely listened to the CS2 tracks because I’ve been blasting Simcity 3K, 4 and metal the whole time.

The first three Metal Gear Solid games have fascinating stories. They’re not the most logically sound stories and they have a lot of weird elements that make them hard to follow. At the micro scale they’re not the most comprehensive. On the macro scale they’re not hard to get into at all. When the story hooks you it really hooks you.

I was a child when I completed the first two MHS games. I never finished MGS3 because the disk got smashed to pieces. I do remember liking it a lot though. MGS2 is my favorite of the bunch. It was a good mix of old characters and new that carried the story in a satisfying way.

The absolute best story in video games(IMO) is the Mass Effect trilogy. For the longest time those games set the bar for video game story telling to me. Every character was so easy to get invested in. I cared for all of them and deciding who completed the journey or not was a series of deeply personal tough choices that carried across three games. Did the ending suck? Absolutely. Do not let that last 0.1% mar what is easily %99.9 one of the best space scifi stories in any medium.

I main Manon. I might have found my second character.