The 365 Days 2022 Gaming Challenge - achievement unlocked.

[MartyG]

Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium - PC - Day 332 Game 332

The second collection of Capcom arcade games. I don't think the selection here is quite as good as the 1st set of games, but there are still a number of big hitters here, like the Dark Stalkers Trilogy and the Street Fighter Alpha trilogy (I think there might be a couple of dupes here if you've got the Capcom Fighting collection).

Overall it's a solid emulation and they've introduced online high-score tables and challenges, so if you are of the competing mindset, then there's plenty of stuff here to boost or belittle your ego.

It'll all depend on if there are enough games in the list to appeal to you to whether it's worth the money, but if you can pick this up for £15-20 for the full collection it's not a bad price.

Overall this one gets 8 Shoryukens out of 10.

[MartyG]

Humankind - PC - Day 333 Game 333

This is a 4X game release last year. At the time the game had some issues with bugs and balance, but since then it's been patched a few times and the odds and sods of gameplay tweaked.

The obvious comparison is Civilization, but they don't really play very similarly. You start off as nomads, exploring the map and gaining stars in 3 different categories that will eventually lead you to be able to build an outpost, which after a few more will allow you to change eras and convert one of your outposts to a city.

At this point more of the game opens up, allowing you to pick a culture that will dictate your main area of focus (like diplomacy, military, science, trading etc), build more building types and research stuff to make your empire more powerful. Many actions in the game rely on influence points that you gain per turn - things like diplomacy actions on treaties will use some of this up for example - all the time you will be exploring and placing outposts to expand your territory.

I think overall that Civ is still a far better game, but there are the seeds of some interesting ideas here that will probably only become an obvious pear tree after a few games.

As it stands I give this one 6 not Sid Meier's out of 10.

[gunrock]

You're almost on the last leg Marty! Keep going...

[MartyG]

City of Gangsters - PC - Day 334 Game 334

Twitch decided it was going to play up tonight, first real problems I've had with it the whole of this challenge, my ups were at 900 Mb/s, so it wasn't me, but hence only 20 mins as it kept stopping and starting every 3 mins :/

This is a tycoon game where you are a would-be gangster in Chicago, of course. This wasn't as much fun as I expected it to be, I was expecting a modern Mugsby, and it was more look at these spreadsheets you mug.

It's all micro-management of all the things, picking up stuff you need, driving to somewhere because you're not close enough, trying to get street corners to expand your empire. Setting up dodgy businesses and protection rackets. It didn't help the stream kept dropping, so I might give this one another go at some point, but I just found it annoying to play.

I give this one 5 Capones out of 10.

[QualityChimp]

Final month, Martino! You can do it!

[MartyG]

Yes, 31 days to go. I think the Twitch issue might have been down to my PC deciding to use wifi rather than ethernet - I have disabled wifi on it now.

[QualityChimp]

Yes, 31 days to go. I think the Twitch issue might have been down to my PC deciding to use wifi

I think if I'd played a different game every single day, I'd have a twitch issue too!

[Cassius_Smoke]

I'd like to see a table of games ordered by score at the end of the year please.

[MartyG]

Parkisaurus - PC - Day 335 Game 335

A tycoon dinosaur theme park game where you manage a dinosaur park.

Build nice enclosures for your ancient lizard pets, dig holes for square lakes and transform your biome into a rainforest, simply by planting a couple of trees.

Yes, you too can be the John Hammond of pixelled predation, all from the safety of your armchair.

It's cheap and clunky, but not too bad for an indy effort - not quite sure about the hiring of staff stuff.

This one gets 6 Spared No Expense out of 10.

[MartyG]

Airbourne Kingdom - PC - Day 336 Game 336

This one is a city builder, with a twist ... you build your cities in the air. There is the usual resource gathering required to build the building you need, but for these tasks you will require workers, to work. You start with nine, and more can be recruited from settlements you'll find on the ground. Each worker will need a home, and to build a home you will need a worker and wood.

Perhaps the most interesting mechanic in this game is the tilt factor - your gravity-defying city in the sky can only do so much with its propellors, so you are required to ensure your city is properly balanced, by making sure that buildings are equally balanced on all sides of your town center. I'm not sure what happens if you only build on one side and totally tilt - I didn't build that far.

One quirk seems to be how workers are assigned to certain buildings - they are auto-assigned, but there is no way to reduce these assignment numbers it seems, in the same way, that you can do this for resource gathering. You can find yourself with no workers to gather resources because of this. I also couldn't find food so my workers started starving.

Overall it's a different and interesting concept but lacks some complexity and once you're passed the airborne thing, I'm not sure there is much here to keep you coming back. I give this one 6 Isaac Newtons out of 10.

[MartyG]

Eastward - PC - Day 337 Game 337

This is an adventure game where you play the character John along with the younger Sammy. You're a miner, working for a controlling Mayor. Things are pretty dingy and grimy, but fortunately, there's a video game (Earth-Born) that you get to play within the game - very meta.

It's quite a cute indie adventure but it's not without its annoyances - the dialogue is super slow, even on the fastest setting. The dialogue will annoyingly repeat itself if you walk in the wrong place and to save a game, you have to go through two dialogue screens to reach the save game function. Every. Single. Time. As if it's the 80s again. Just no.

I did quite like the story, so if you can get past the quirks the game has, then this is worth a look. I give it 7 dream within a dream within a dream out of 10.

[MartyG]

Soulstone Survivors - PC - Day 338 Game 338

This is another Vampire Survivors clone, but this time with 3Der graphics. It's still a top-down perspective, but with more shiny.

When I started my first game, I thought yup this is pretty much identical, but as things progressed it became a little clearer that this does have a little bit of a different spin on the now genre of game.

In this one, with its Egyptian setting, you gain powers a lot quicker and there is a twin-stick shooter element to it for the ranged attacks, even though it is still auto-shoot. There is also a dodgy mechanic that definitely becomes a necessity because you will encounter boss fights (the lords) as you defeat a certain number of minions. These have huge area attacks and a lot of health, although I found that strafing them and dodging their area attacks could take at least the earlier ones down faster.

There is then the Rogue-lite character advancement that you can spend collected gems on, and character and map unlocks. There are some additional unlocks with runes, but I didn't progress that far to see what that was all about.

Overall, this is a pretty satisfying game to play but is double the price of Vampire Survivors. At £7 tho, I don't think it's an obscene price for the fun factor, if anything they should have made VS more expensive.

This one gets 8 How dare you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library out of 10.

[MartyG]

Songs of Conquest - PC - Day 339 Game 339

This one is a strategy game - you are the daughter of a dead King and left in charge. Clearly Cecilia has issues though, with a chip on a shoulder as if it's a burden to be brought up in a life of privilege, she goes about the place with a mouth on her dishing out orders to everyone and killing those that dare to oppose her.

Things play out on a overworld map where you get to move a certain distance per turn, click next turn and then move some more - which kind of makes turns a bit pointless at this juncture. It does look like later there's base building and research (which would make turns more meaningful) but after an hour of play, none of this was unlocked.

Things are also stacked quite highly against you as you have a limited number of troops with little availability of replenishing them. Battles are turned-based, but the only real strategy to them seems to be having the high ground and simply becoming a battle of attrition, if you have more numbers, you're pretty much guaranteed to win. Often it's easier and more likely that you'll win just to have the AI auto-battle and tell you the outcome. This then kinda makes it pointless being a strategy game.

It is in early access and I can see that there's potential here and maybe things will be more interesting once your wielder (you, controlling battle) unlocks more spells you can use to buff troops on the battlefield - but this is all a maybe. As it is, this one gets 7 Are we the baddies? out of 10.

[MartyG]

Dwarf Fortress - PC - Day 340 Game 340

This is a bit of a classic game. It goes all the way back to 2006, when it started life as an ASCII-based game and grew from that point on.

It has recently received its release on Steam, this time with "prettier" graphics. At its heart, it's still an ASCII-based game, but hidden underneath is a whole complexity of game systems.

The game plays in real time, having set up a load of game history, you take control and it's time to mine the mountains. There are two modes you can play: fortress and adventure (although the latter is not yet available in the Steam version), and this kinda plays out like Rimworld, which you may be more familiar with. You tell the Dwarfs in the colony what to do, assigning tasks and priorities, and eventually when they've slept and eaten, will get around to doing it.

It's not without its problems tho - at least playing it at 4K, there was a lot of overlapping text (not sure if this was down to scaling) and windows hiding other windows with buttons on that you couldn't see that you needed to press to progress. Also, although there is a tutorial and some help pages, it's nowhere near enough to understand the complexities of this game, and the UI is fairly woeful, lacking context-sensitive help much of the time.

People spend their lives only playing this game, and that's something you could quite easily do - but it will take time to learn if you want to get the most out of it, it's definitely not a casual game or for those that want AAA action and visuals. It has a nice soundtrack tho.

This one gets 9 Khazad-dûms out of 10.

[MartyG]

Honey, I Joined a Cult - PC - Day 341 Game 341

This one is supposedly a colony sim, but it's more colony sim lite, or a Tycoon style game. It has more in common with Prison Architect than it does Dwarf Fortress. Nonetheless, it still seems like a pleasant enough game to play, even though there's probably not a huge amount of long term content here compared to DF.

The idea is to build a cult, getting visitors to pay you money for using the various facilities and with luck, turning them into followers eventually.

You get to build buildings and facilities, go on missions and perform daily sermons. There's the usual need to balance the books, look after your cult members' needs and try to make as much money as you can from the whales.

Overall, I give this one 7 Members of Heaven’s Gate out of 10.