Recent reviews by Kachin

This is easily one of the best management games that I've ever played. The balance is stellar, the game can be difficult even if you're a fan of the genre, or easy if you want to play with a friend who isn't. The developers let you customize the game's parameters instead of having an ego and wanting to decide for you what "difficulty" means. These guys just /get it/.

If you're a fan of management games: Seriously, just get this game, it's fine, you're good, I mean it. You can probably stop reading here. For everyone else:

The suggested goal of the game is to try to survive for as long as possible. The game stops throwing useful random events at you after the year 2030 or so, but there's an achievement for running until 2050 if you need an overt and obvious "okay you win"-style of screen.

The game ends if you run out of money for too many months in a row. You can reset this trivially by being positive when one month ticks over, but bailing yourself out like this grows more difficult the more you have to do it. So, ideally, try not to need to do it every two years.

To accomplish this survival, you can design and sell games. You can do this in many forms; you can, for example, mere design the code for a game and then sell the resulting code to another company that will physicall produce the cartidges. Or, you can make the cartirdges yourself, too. Or, you can not do any design, instead take other people's ideas, and put them on cartridges for sale. Or you can do none of this, and instead buy another company and direct how they manage these actions. Or, don't touch games at all, and do contract work on smaller tasks. List goes on and on and on. Most of the fun stuff revolves around game development, though, if you couldn't somehow already guess this based on the name of this game.

You aren't tasked with being "the best", so you can almost treat this as a survival game. In survival games, technically-speaking, you can achieve the stated goal of "don't die" by doing the bare minimum that is required and then hiding forever. It won't be very fun, but it'll work, and the extra complexity of survival games comes from people's own self-imposed ideas of what "should" "help".

By the same logic, you can easily make it to year 2050 without hiring any employees or making any games, but this probably won't be fun. It's easy to make things fun, though, and most players will default to doing what appears fun to them, and the game simply facilitates this. It's beautiful when it's done correctly, and this game allows for it easily. There's dozens of different ways to get to 2050 while maintaining certain self-imposed requirements, like arbitrarily deciding that you have to hire a new person every year, or that you must release a new game every year, and it all /just works/.

The game does a great deal to ensure that if and when you fail, that you only have yourself to blame. It's very hard for things to "sneak up" on you if you don't get into the habit of dismissing every pop-up window as soon as it appears, and especially if you don't fast-forward time. (Never fast-forward time in management games; you're only hurting yourself.) This way, you never get angry at the game; you know you failed because you did such-and-such, it's never a mystery, so you know how to improve on your next attempt. I think this is a fundamentally critical aspect that any good management game needs to have.

The developers have added a lot of QOL features over the years, and it's stuff that I genuinely appreciate. From a non-fan, things like "you can now order and filter this list" may seem boring or easy, but believe me: They're harder to implement than you'd think, and they're very exciting for people like me. Deciding what /not/ to add, matters, too. Fully automating the creation of games without needing any user input /sounds/ like a good idea, but in reality, I think it'd take away from the possibility of failing and being able to blame yourself rather than the game, so I think it's good that that isn't implemented.

Decisions like these get complicated. This developer handles them well. This is rare.

Overall, I think that Mad Games Tycoon 2 (and also 1!) is a great example of what a great management game should be. I can't think of many ways to improve upon it. The devs leading the whole thing have good heads on their shoulders. You can spend your money on this game without reservation.

This game tries to be Factorio, but it's Factorio without QOL (which is understandable due to Early Access), and it tries to do too much for you. Factorio is basically just a programming language that pretends to be a game, and it has a really nice IDE that gets the heck out of your way and lets you get on with your task. Dyson is like an IDE that constantly pops autocompletions up, has modal windows that steal your focus, and otherwise appears helpful to an uninformed observer, but just ticks actual programmers off.

Game's okay if you play for visuals only, but the flight and aircraft are very unrealistic. If you want IFR, do not buy this game: IFR doesn't work, and the latest update (September 16th, 2020) broke it even more, along with various mods that tried to fix it. Performance is abysmal unless you're on a very recent high-end system. Community is generally toxic as heck and care-bears the heck out of microsoft/asobo. People rip into indie devs selling their game for $20 when a tiny thing doesn't work, but a steaming pile of garbage that costs $100+ somehow gets away scott-free.Side-note: Despite Steam claiming that in-game purchases are refundable, they are not; it works by buying in-game currency and immediately spending it to buy what you've selected.

I'm crying. Go in blind.

This is not a game; somebody recorded a movie, chopped it up, and makes you view it out-of-order. I've played for a total of twenty two minutes, but lost the drive to keep "playing" about nine minutes in. There is no progression, there is no leveling up, no XP meters, no HP, nothing. This almost sounds like a puzzle game, except it's not even that, because there's no levels or victory screens, either.

Let me get three paragraphs out of the way real fast.. This game's pretty old, and I'm pretty sure it was experimental at the time. I got it when I was a kid in an age where online multiplayer was flaky at best, and downloadable games of this scale were unfathomable.

As a result, I had few "big" games and played the few that I had *constantly*. I've become relatively good at Perimeter, but it took months since I had absolutely no help from anyone else.

What people say about the tutorial is true; it's enough to tell you that you can click things, and that's basically it. You're really on your own and need to be able to handle adventure games without Googling to be able to cope with this RTS.


If you're all good with that, then we can go on to specifics!

So, Perimeter basically has no real story. A "modern" gamer probably won't enjoy this title. The game was designed during the golden years of RTS games, so all of the attention is geared towards the actual gameplay and graphics. The gameplay is fairly unique; less-so today, but especially unique for when it came out: It's about 33% territory control and 66% Poker. I don't know what the missing 1% is, but I'm sure it's nifty!

In a typical game of Perimeter, normal "battles" will last under 5 minutes per enemy. Decisions are fast and unforgiving. Against a computer it's easy to hold out for an indefinite amount of time, but another player will typically make it impossible to keep things at a stalemate. The campaign stuff might last longer, but that's primarily because they keep throwing new wrenches into things.

Territory control isn't usually what makes someone /win/, but it sure causes people to /lose/. The "Poker" element comes in by having all units be made of three basic units, and being able to morph between other units at will. The "mix" of units in a morph isn't shown to your opponents, so "hiding" units in other units can be helpy.


All in all, this is a quirky, unique, and (for me) very addictive RTS from when RTS games were *awesome*. "Perimeter 2" is absolute trash in comparison and a very poor attempt to bring a golden age RTS into more modern times; truly, Perimeter will only appeal to a very small subset of RTS fans. The game's not even $5 if memory serves, so if you think you're the kind of person who likes this stuff, give it a shot!