PopTop. Railroad Tycoon 2&3 and Tropico 1&2. They got bought by 2K, which eventually killed the studio. The Railroad Tycoon series is dead. Tropico is still around, but I’m not excited about the latest interation. Some of the guys tried to kickstart a new Railroad Tycoon but it didn’t fund. Phil Steinmeyer was an underrated developer, though I believe he’s retired today.

It’s too bad it worked out that way. I think they could have been on the level with Paradox as far as strategy games are concerned, but focusing more on economic games, city builders, and the like. On Steinmeyer’s blog he said he didn’t think there was demand for heavier games anymore about mid 00s. That might have been true then, but so many games out now prove that wrong.

Intrinsically, definitely. Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Victoria 2, and etc.

Mostly just Minecraft out of the box. I feel that resource packs and certain performance mods like optifine could be accurately referred to as “vanilla with optifine” or “vanilla with such-and-such pack.” Once you get into datapacks or Forge or Fabric or hacked clients, it’s not vanilla.

Serverside, it’s a little more dodgy. How many server plugins can you have before it’s not vanilla?

That said, I don’t think there’s much reason to play Java Edition over Bedrock other than mods or wanting to play on older, pre-bedrock versions. Then again, I almost solely play modded anymore so I don’t have a lot of vanilla Bedrock under my belt to compare the two.

Pretty sure Forge is dead in the water. The majority of devs left for NeoForge, and it’s likely the majority of moddevs will follow.

New plays were:

• Mahjong
• John Company
• Sol
• Nana
• Kreigbot
• Kremlin
• Lifeboats
• Category 5
• Fresh Fish
• Santiago

Warsim deserves love. It’s a real passion project: a text-based kingdom management sim with lots of things to do and nooks and crannies to explore.

There’s a pair of Beatles albums in this list. I don’t mind “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or “Revolution 9,” but “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver counts for me. Frankly, it’s the worst Beatles song. I prefer the Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair cover of it on It’s Spooky to the Beatles version. It’s just that bad.

I love the mix of shocked and disappointed reactions.

Yeah, modded Minecraft is still a big deal. You can join us over at !moddedminecraft@sopuli.xyz if you want. The mod Create is a big deal right now, and rightfully so. It may well be the greatest of all time, as far as Minecraft mods go.

Gotta love the projection. “They’ll do to us what we did to the Indians!”