I got a new phone last month, because the screen on my old one broke. My new phone has a 5-ish inch 1080p screen. That's means it has an insane pixel density! On my podcast, I occasionally talk about some new program that increases efficiency, but doesn't change standards and fits within existing ecosystems. My favorite is MozJPEG. It's a program that encodes JPEG images much better than (almost) all others. Since I keep high resolution images of almost all the images on my blog (and share them), I experimented.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall was originally DLC for Shadowrun Returns, but got turned into an expand-alone game. The game mechanics are mostly identical between the two (from what I noticed). However, Returns is set in Seattle, but Dragonfall is set in Berlin. The two have zero story continuity, aside from two characters appearing in both (not even your own), and they don't refer to anything in Seattle.
CD Projekt Red (the people behind The Witcher series) recently turned on the hype machine about their next game, Cyberpunk 2077. Since they took me to the promised land, I'm watching their next game closely (the only game I'm watching outside of crowdfunded games). Even though I'm trying not to get sucked up in the hype, I wanted to satiate that desire. I looked in my Steam library and found some Shadowrun games (no doubt from the many Humble Bundles I've purchased). Recalling that it has a cyberpunk-like setting, I downloaded and started playing.
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is a peculiar game. It fills an uninteresting gap between Borderlands (after its DLC) and its sequel. By playing Borderlands 2, you kinda know how it's going to end up, but this game fills in the details. The game is set on Elpis, the moon of Pandora (the planet where you've been fighting for the last two games). Because 2K Australia made The Pre-Sequel, Elpis is inhabited by people with Australian accents.
Dead Space is a third person linear sci-fi horror game. ("Linear" isn't derogatory!) You are Issac Clarke, a mute (but not amnesiac) ship engineer. The game begins as you approach Ishimura, a mining ship that has sent a distress signal. Once you land, things quickly go from the worst to... more worse. The inhabitants have mutated into zombies (called "necromorphs"), and your ride gets destroyed. The ship starts going through an asteroid field without defenses, and the air is slowly being poisoned. You discover that the planet that was being mined below struck an alien artifact of some kind. This was a beacon to a cult that believed the government was covering up alien life. They stole the artifact, started worshiping it, had hallucinations, and everything went to hell.
You remember the Humble Bundles, right? I remember when I looked at my Steam game list years ago, and realized that most of them were from Humble Bundles, and that I hadn't even played most of them. So I picked one from the list and started playing. Aquaria was at the top of the list, so I started with that. That was over 5 years ago.
Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is another episodic series of games based on a web comic. These games are RPGs, not point and click adventures. Like the Homestar Runner comics, I wouldn't call myself a fan of Penny Arcade. To me, their humor is mostly a crapshoot, because half of their material is making in-jokes about games I don't have or aren't interested in.
