Hey everyone - it's that time of year again when we get close to crowning our 2024 champion, and when we organise everything for 2025!

It currently looks like we're in for a third win from @clumsypenguin, but there's always a chance and it ain't over 'til the final game releases! Don't forget to cash in those super drops if you have them, and use those counter-picks to avoid being penalised for leaving one empty.

Returning players:
If you have played in ANY of the previous league years, your username will be already listed on the 2025 league page. If you want to take part in 2025, all you need to do is create your publisher before the end of the year. Just login on the FCL site and visit this page to get yourself ready for the 2025 season.

New players:
If you have never taken part in previous seasons, you are more than welcome to take part and can do so by creating a free FCL account here. Once you have that sorted, come back here and click on this invite link, which will allow you to sign up for the 2025 season. Finally, you will need to create your publisher before the end of the year to secure your spot in the 2025 season.

Everyone:
- Sign ups will close at the end of the year (31st December 2024)
- Ensure you have created your publisher before sign-ups close.
- Anyone without a publisher at the end of the year will be removed from the league and unable to take part in the 2025 season.
- The 2025 draft will begin on 1st of January 2025.
- All league rules and settings are remaining the same as the 2024 season.

Of course, please feel free to ask questions if you have them, either in this thread, or in our Discord channel. I will repost the draft rules before the end of the year so keep an eye out, but otherwise please READ the highly informative posts on the forum thread, and/or watch some of the videos we already have out there.

On a more personal note, I have been very busy with work in recent times, so I apologise for not being as involved as in previous years, but it's been great to see everyone filling their rosters and still taking part. I'm really looking forward to a new season and seeing what hot games will come in 2025, but for now let's enjoy the rest of 2024 and see if anyone can possibly topple the carry-over champ!

I nominate Myst

my noms:

Wave to the People: itch / HLTB
LODGE: itch
From Orbit: itch / HLTB

I recently started listening to the podcast and am enjoying it immensely. I'm currently at episode 20 of season 2, so a long time to go still, but I must say I love the atmosphere and friendly banter amongst you all! I've started hearing Abotages voice thanks to the fantasy critic league segments, so already a bit prepped for season 3 :).

I've been using HLTB for quite a while to log my games (with some hiatuses), but I never knew there was such a fun community hiding in the forums. So the HLTB podcast is a great way to get new people into the forums too! (Although I'm still a bit lost at times with all the different threads going on).

Hey that's awesome - glad you're enjoying it =)

There are currently some future plans in the works so definitely stay tuned - it's a great community and there are many more voices to hear in later episodes!

Only one that interests me here is Inside, which I have finished a couple of times and is an exceptional game. Highly recommend it to anyone who likes games =)

I nominate the infamous FMV powerhouse: Harvester

The end has come and the season finishes up with this final episode where @pokepaw and I take a look to the future. What are we keen to finish? What’s been sitting on the backlog begging to be played? What new releases are we looking forward to in the future?

Thanks to everyone who contributed and helped support season three and make it fun. It was a blast to put together, but all good things must come to an end. Who knows what will happen in the future, but for now, it’s done!

Thanks for listening.

In this penultimate episode of season 3: I have been battling insane robotics, meditating with pixel art, and tweaking hardware in search of stability, while @pokepaw
continues to catch them all, and till the land in pursuit of abundance and anime.

Then we have a special showdown to decide who really is the crowned champion of our guessing game. So far we’ve each won a round, but can a final battle sort the wheat from the chaff? This isn’t Stardew Valley…

Wow, very first nomination for GotM and bam! It wins. And I have no idea why since I know almost nothing about the game except it's been on my backlog for a while. Hope this wasn't a terrible choice. Have fun everyone!

[EDIT : shouldn't it be listed under my post or is it because the thread is linked to 'Bully' and not to 'Scholarship Edition'?]

Correct - it will only show stats for the game the post is linked to - which in this case is Bully, not Scholarship Edition =)

Due to circumstances well beyond our control, there will be no episode of the HLTB Podcast this week - life just had to go and get in the way, preventing us from getting a new episode in the bag.

While I'm sure this comes as quite the disappointing blow for many of us, the penultimate episode of the season should be fresh and ready for next week - with some fun stuff to start wrapping everything up.

We hope you'll come along for the final episodes when they are done, but unti then, play some games or something and like... have fun! :D

The time has come! @pokepaw’s tenure as educational administrator is at an end, but at what cost?! Has she done enough to justify the hard decisions and moist frogs that frequented the journey? Are we finally witnessing the liberation of indentured students?!

Meanwhile I have made it to the end of my own journey, but even a murder case in court seems poultry by comparison. Add to that some hard moral decisions and wartime carnage, and I still don’t seem like the worst dictator we’ve seen.

Finally, the topic this week turns to the HLTB Game of the Month, which I am definitely a fan of and have a lot to speak on and in no way leave it all up to @pokepaw.

Enjoy the episode!

Only got a couple hours in on it but here is the WIP to give you a general idea:



So Far:
Support for Add / Removing from Lists
Support for updating Platform and/or Storefront

Musings:
Right now you can select any lists, any page, swap between them, etc. basically full freedom to move throughout. You can check anything on any of those views. It will keep track of the count at the bottom and then you can take action. I'm trying to decide if this will end up being confusing for people. It has the benefit of being incredibly flexible but I want the user to understand they are deleting everything they have checked. The alternative is only allowing you to work with what is currently on display.

There will be more work done on UI design. It already looks a bit different than the video. Maybe something like "Updating 23 Games from Playing, Backlog & Completed" to explain that it may be more than you are currently viewing. There is no select all because I want the user to explicitly choose which items to update so there are no accidental changes.

the check boxes being on the right feel weird to me - but might just be me - I would expect them to be on the left as with other systems =)

Is it a myth? Is it real? Can you actually do that amazing thing in that popular game? This week we’re talking about the rumours and myths that make up gaming folklore. Has the internet taken away the mystery? Or are there still exciting surprises to be had? We raise some questions, but do we manage to answer them?

Plus, @pokepaw continues her spiral into darkness as she manipulates students for her own benefit, and rules her colony of beavers with an iron fist. Before diving back into an old favourite for some more Otome adventures.

Meanwhile I have been trying some new things and making new friends after finding them in a strange new world. I’m still convinced that I have nearly reached the end of the ongoing courtroom drama, and have been avoiding nightmares while fishing for gold in the fog.

All this and more in this latest episode!

Welcome to the shortest episode description, because I am tired and the words aren’t working.

This week we talk about games, and videogame preservation.

Enjoy!

Come sail the seven seas this week as gaming piracy is up for discussion, with all its swashbuckling and spicy takes. Is there a moral imperative to bend the rules from time to time? Or is it simply misguided righteousness in this topsy-turvy world of easily obtained loot and booty?

Before that though, @Pokepaw and I work through a short list of games we’ve been playing and finishing, as is tradition. @Pokepaw continues to apply pressure on her students, design epic rodent-built towns, and play with a never ending parade of cats. Meanwhile I have finished my final race, uncovered complex hidden murder mystery facts, and pondered the existential meaning of cooperation.

Strap yourself in… and bring on the feedback!

I nominate: We Love Katamari REROLL+ Royal Reverie

Yes, the hot rumours are true and the end of Season 3 has now been set to sometime in the next couple of months. While there are still a good handful of episodes left, we would love to hear from anyone who may be interested in hosting the podcast into Season 4. So get in touch at hltbpodcast@gmail.com.

Meanwhile, @Pokepaw is continuing her educational rampage of tyranny this week, while also manipulating felines and solving puzzles. All as I follow the mysterious trail of a relic with magic powers, and fight alien enemies on a planet far, far away.

Then the discussion focuses on Gaming Guilty Pleasures where tangents abound, and everything goes a little bit TED Talk for a while. Then again, does it really matter/ Are you having fun?

In this episode: @pokepaw brings back an out-dated form of employment, while satiating her power-hungry need for order and conformity. Also, I die repeatedly on alien planets, and dive deep into the lore of weird cults and relics that leave bodies in their wake.

Then the discussion turns to open world games, which was totally not a suggested subject that an AI bot came up with. Not at all.

Finally, we end the episode with a big announcement that may or may not include puppies. Tune in to find out!

(please note, there are no puppies in this episode, we at the HLTB Podcast apologise for the inconvenience)

Now that I've also completed the ones I'm going to complete - it was a bit of a middling itchmas in July for me - but as always, am happy to have checked out the games I did, even if most of them didn't land for me.

I think my favourites were Folder Dungeon and Day of the Hamster... the latter because it was a great homage to those LucasArts point and click adventures, and the former simply because it was a fun take on a saturated genre.

I didn't mind that all the games i tried weren't all that fleshed out - as that's kind of the point of the exercise, and most are just proofs of concept so I had a fun time seeing what people came up with either way.

Unsurprisingly, the ones I really didn't like were the platformers - Mobius sounded good, but I couldn't retire it fast enough when I started - not my taste at all - didn't even try Mr Platformer, because I feel like I know how that would have turned out.

The most disappointing for me was probably Pretty Coo' because I felt like it promised a lot more than it delivered and I really disliked the shit controls and kind of soft-locked myself because I didn't realise you were actually meant to keep the pigeons around and they all flew away...

Red Snow was a nice concept as well, but just too slim in its execution - would like to see this taken further into some kind of snowboarding/combat hybrid... but this concept was very limited.

Overally though, I still had fun checking out these random games and I'll be looking forward to the next one - even if this was perhaps the weakest showing yet IMO.

I’ve noticed sometimes a lower score will get placed above higher scores

looks like it might because it's calculating a percentage from the scores and then rounding it out?
not sure, but the ones that swap seem like they would be rounded to the same whole percentage

Just a slight gripe I've had with live service games on this platform, is that you're allowed to give a "completion time" when the game is still releasing new story content every other month. I feel that for live services (Final Fantasy XIV, Zenless Zone Zero etc.) completion times should only account in shape of separate content bits released overtime (marked as DLCs) and the main page should somehow reflect that it's not truly complete-able yet

Not sure what would be most optimal here - just a note, or replacing "completion times" with something else, i.e. "spent time by players" or idk

There is an option when you edit a game page's details that can be ticked to select "combined stats" where it basically marks the title as endless and combines all stats as they are non-distinguishable. That might help?!

It’s all about games, games, and more games this episode as we have been playing, retiring, and completing a bunch of different titles. For some reason though, there seems to have been a lot of cats involved… which has to be a good thing, right?

Plus, it’s Steam sale time, so we reveal the bargains we picked up and perhaps a few random additions along the way. The budgets are real, but there are some deep discounts that are worth taking a look at either way.

Just don’t think about the backlog…

I played Folder Dungeon and it was great - I died my first run, but managed to get to the end on the second (~15 mins total) - really engaging and once you get into the rhythm, the whole thing is quick and easy to understand. I really like how it made you actually have to strategise a bit thanks to the heat system, so you can't just hit every single "folder" and max out your stats.

Great start and a lot of fun!

This week I’ve been spending most of my time scavenging parts from derelict ships, laughing at renaissance absurdity, and sticking my nose into a new criminal case. While @pokepaw returned to the conflict of world domination, continued to catch them all, solved puzzles with bricks, and went rogue at the start of an epic adventure.

If that wasn’t enough, we dive into a discussion about different video game business models and whether that subscription is really worth it, or if that DLC should have been part of the game in the first place. Can micro-transactions ever be okay?

Tune in to find out!

I nominate: We Love Katamari REROLL+ Royal Reverie