If this runs bearably well and has a decent percent of the complexity of Factorio, this could well be something I'm going to spend a very long time playing... gotta finish my Seablock run before the end of the year it seems!
I love this game, and most of the rest of Zachtronics stuff. And this quick look went better than I would have expected really heh. Enthusiasm and decent puzzle solving skills on show, even in a 'design by committee' situation.
And because everyone loves more gifs, here's my Rocket Propellant and Explosive Phial fastest attempts:
When I came to think about things that made Mania good after I finished my first playthrough, I realised this: I never fell in a single bottomless pit the entire game.
And that's not just because I'm not terrible at Sonic, it's because the levels are actually well designed. In fact, the only place I know of for sure that a bottomless pit even exists is outside Flying Battery.
Of course, I'm a fan of the fast 2D Sonic games (Rush, Rush Adventure and Advance 2), so I already like eye candy speed section into route change manoeuvre into eye candy speed section, and generally getting a flow through a smooth route. But now I've started going back to get more chaos emeralds, slowing down and exploring works just fine too, often helped by the new or 'remixed' mechanics sprinkled in all over.
Planet Coaster expects you to build a custom building around ride tracks to serve as the ride station, for example, but there are no affordances to make sure the height of the tracks conforms to the height of the standard building blocks.
You mean aside from the specific button in the ride menu that initiates building mode from the station grid, since all coaster stations are exact multiples of 4mx4m? With wall pieces that are specifically shaped to fit around where the track leaves the station?
Nitpicking aside, I agree with most of this, just maybe not quite as strongly. Planet Coaster is a really decent mix of grided parts and free placement, but is really constrained by how much time and effort you want to put in to make something that's 'just for you', especially if you want to go outside the bounds of the obvious scenery sets and use parts to simulate a different style.
But what annoys me more about the building system are inconsistencies; parts that are for some reason in the 'wrong' group (like half the shop signs being in 'scenery' instead of 'building'), parts that have a default alignment that makes no sense to how you'd use them (like a wooden post that is default aligned to lay on a surface instead of sticking out like many other similar posts), some parts which you can't colour when similar parts in the same set you can.
With just a tiny bit more ease of use, and less inconsistencies, building in Planet Coaster would be even better, but it's already one of the best.
Thanks @zombiepie for putting my little Planet Coaster blogs up there.
It's been a bit slow going playing the game, since I'm in the depths of building a tropical colonial style town right now, but I've still got images backed up for probably two more blogs. Next one should be up tomorrow.
Played 4 hours and now I have a headache thanks to puzzles and forgetting to drink my tea.
I'm liking it a lot, but... I feel like Brad's 'favorite take ever on the video game collectible' was at first a really cool thing to discover, but the coolness kinda wears off with how many of them there are... and once the newness has worn off, they start to feel much less interesting by their lesser complexity than the actual puzzles on the screens.
Also: Not exactly 'best use of FMV 2016', but it was still pretty surprising heh.
For anyone looking for more samples of PC performance, this seems to run just fine on my 670 at whatever settings it picked by default, which seems to be mostly 'high' at least. Though, over the years it's been determined that I'm not very sensitive to frame rates (I was happy enough playing TF2 at 15fps), so 'just fine' is always subjective... I'd say it's probably keeping over 30, because I haven't noticed frame rate dropping at all yet.
Zeg's comments