May Progress Picks: Game Dev Tycoon, Glass Masquerade and Mini Metro

• DiRT Rally
  

  40 hours playtime

  125 of 170 achievements

• Game Dev Tycoon
  

  52 hours playtime

  35 of 35 achievements

• Glass Masquerade
  

  8 hours playtime

  27 of 27 achievements

• Mini Metro
  

  40 hours playtime

  41 of 45 achievements

In my last update I predicted I’d have finished ACIV: Black Flag but unfortunately I’ve struggled to get into it and I’ve put it on hold for now, alongside Witcher 3, it doesn’t feel right to try and force enjoyment in great games I should enjoy but not feeling right now. Instead I’ve mostly been trying to find games that I can play in short bursts which is something that seems to be more appealing at the moment.

I’d be really interested in some recommendations from my backlog which either have a short completion time or can be played in small sessions.

Dirt Rally - I’ve marked this as beaten which is always a bit hard to classify in non-story games but I’ve beaten the community average times, the deltas, for all the tracks and managed to overcome the dreaded Hillclimb, beating the AI to win the championship, which without a doubt goes down as one of my proudest gaming achievements.

Game Dev Tycoon - Going through my completed game list I noticed some new achievements had been added, thanks blaeo for making it easy to identify this, very helpful. A new “Pirate mode” had been added as an extra challenge where your games get pirated, resulting in considerable impact on sales unless you try and combat this with the latest DRM technology, so you’ve got less income and you need to focus technology points on security, making this a considerable challenge to an already difficult game unless you’re familiar with the best combos and you’re an expert with sliders. It took a few attempts, the start was especially difficult as it’s impossible not to go into debt, but I can mark it as a completed again and this is absolutely one of those where did the last 5 hours go that I can thoroughly recommend.

Glass Masquerade - I went through a phase of doing those jigsaw puzzles on SG a year or two ago… sadly there were some really evil people out there that would pick the most blank images that I lost my enjoyment doing them as you were just sifting through hundreds of shapes. This game does jigsaws right, it takes you around the world assembling these lovely to look at stained glass pieces of art that each took me on average 5-10 minutes to complete. Very relaxing to play with some nice music, absolutely recommend this to anyone wanting a casual game to play for an hour or two at a time.

Mini Metro - And the game I played the most this month… 40 hours in Mini Metro! Another one of those install as I have no idea what else to play and this seems like it might be easy to get into, and I was right. It starts very simple, you connect together a square, a circle, and a triangle, and from there new shapes start appearing, usually more of those first three to begin with, which act as stations, and your job is to transport the shapes from one station to another, the game ends if the shapes start getting impatient and it can get very frantic with game over clocks appearing everywhere, with things to regularly consider like the carriage sizes, multiple lines to avoid connecting two of the same shape, lines or loops, accounting for unique shapes in remote areas, and what upgrade to get each week like whether to go for an interchange for faster collecting/dropping off or some bridges to allow you to reduce pressure on a busy island circuit… reading that back I haven’t done a good job making it interesting, it’s a metro game about transporting shapes after all, but trust me there’s plenty of enjoyment to this game even it might not look like it on first glances.