I bought them ages ago and let me tell you, crazy taxi without the offspring is just not the same. Borrowing the original versions for free from the internet is the only way to go.
I am pretty sure I picked up the Android version for free a few years ago and it had The Offspring but I installed it just now and it’s gone. It’s also now talking about ads and data collection so I assume the original build has been unavailable for a while.
Reminds me of the 90’s. When anime was becoming more available in the west. Titles like Ghost in the Shell, Akira and La Blue Girl. Everyone here just figured they were cartoons and cartoon were for kids. So kids got to watch it…
Now it’s like they see poker, so it must be gambling. Doesn’t matter it’s not the case at all.
Wife thought the same thing about anime when I met her, now it’s almost all she’ll watch. She’s had to get used to some of the…cultural differences…that Anime includes, but she’s so used to it now that it barely registers any more.
ETA: this is mostly a dig at the depictions of teenagers in Neon Genesis specifically, and especially the unhealthy relationships between adults and children in that show
The national government in Japan is a pile geriatrics who don’t want to do anything. Pretty much every prefecture(think state or provenance) raised the age of consent to 18 a long time ago.
I remember politely telling the guy at my local Family Video that “Watership Down” should probably be removed from the kid’s section. He scoffed at me and just gave me a “yeah… mkay.”
A few weeks later, I noticed it was gone. I commented on it to a different guy this time and he said “yeeeeah, the boss’ sister brought it home for her kids. It’s gone now. Like… actually gone.”
Childhood trauma could have been avoided with that one.
I saw la blue girl when I was 18 and it traumatized me. That shit is fucked up. I thought it was anime bc my friend had a big collection and it was just there on the shelf.
It’s a weird hentai, but it’s overall pretty tame.
Bible Black is more intense. Then Urutsikodoji. Then some other fucked up anime that didn’t stick into my memory. La Blue Girl is barely a step above regular hentai in fucked-up-ness.
Agreed, this will anger young people, who need to be shaken awake to let them know that politics isn’t a fucking game. Conservatism and authoritarianism is poison, they just didn’t understand that yet.
I actually kinda think it was intentional. Any business savvy person knew these tariffs were coming and that they would be disruptive especially to something like the Switch 2.
It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.
It’s not. EGS doesn’t solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.
Not only that but it’s a worse user experience all around.
I fucking hate the EGS and Xbox stores for browsing new games. Most of the time you’ll get an animated video that’s not game footage and two screenshots that don’t tell you shit.
Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.
Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.
For Xbox, that’s because the PC app is literally copy/pasted from the Xbox console app. Hell, it probably is the same universal app since that was a big Microsoft push to have more apps available on the consoles and Windows Phone.
Lol I thought it was just my advanced age of 33 that made it difficult to understand a game from the Xbox previews. A majority of screenshots look like garbage once you’re not in character and the store highlights that.
The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.
If anything, the only thing that other stores have that Steam doesn’t would be games not on Steam. Even then, half of the time, they’re either itch(dot)io exclusive indie titles or shitty triple AAA titles.
When I buy on GOG, I know I’m getting a game DRM-free. They muddied that a tad with how they handle online multiplayer, but for the most part, I get more value from their store for that. It’s a huge reason why I’d choose their store, because they’re solving a problem for me that Steam does not.
While I normally check both locations and buy from GOG if it’s available there, you would be surprised how many Steam titles are completely DRM free.
I needed some DRM free games for the classroom last year and was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the smaller, indie games I own Steam, the ones I was most interested in bringing into the classroom to begin with, run perfectly well on a machine without Steam even installed just by copying the folder to a flash drive. Some required deleting a Steam.dll or adding a text document that states the SteamID of the game, but most of the games I wanted I was able to run from a flash drive, DRM free, no Internet, Steam or game install required.
Steam offers DRM to devs that want it, but it is not a DRM platform in of itself.
I’m aware, but when GOG takes the ambiguity out of it, I don’t have to do tons of extra research to know that they have an extra feature that’s important to me. I’d really appreciate if some store took the ambiguity out of it when it comes to multiplayer games being playable offline. It’s something that Steam should easily tell you in theory, but there are tons of games that have LAN and such without bothering to report it. Some say they require an online connection and actually don’t. These are problems worth solving for me, a particular kind of consumer.
I’m with you, but they’ve got a very generous 30 day refund policy, no matter how many hours played, if it doesn’t work. So far, I’ve only had to use it once, on Phantom Fury, which is Verified on Steam but had issues in the tutorial through GOG; some day I’ll pick up the Steam version and see if it does any better. I also buy my GOG games through Heroic launcher, which has a referral link so that some of the revenue of my sale goes toward the development of Heroic. That way GOG knows that if they want all of the revenue from my sale, it’s clear what they have to do to earn it.
And as a reminder, there are Linux native games on GOG. I just played Duck Detective: The Secret Salami on the native Linux version from GOG.
The hotdog vendor keeps going on about how he’s the good guy because he pays more to the sausage suppliers. As if that’s at all relevant to his customers.
To be fair, with regular groceries, it’s not uncommon for consumers to be concerned about whether or not the person who manufactured or processed the good or food you are buying was paid a fair wage. So in that sense, it is kind of relevant to the hotdog vendors customers.
I’m only playing devils advocate though. Fuck epic lol
yesssssssss, but the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can't because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand, and the second responds by attempting to throw piss water-balloons at any passers by, or something
the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can’t because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand
It’s more accurate to say that the plain hotdog vendor wants to sell the other vendor’s hotdogs at a lower price at his own stand, thereby undercutting the sales of the first vendor for their own hotdogs.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
Nope, you are wrong, this is a common mistake that Epic keeps spreading as missinformation. Valve does NOT enforce price parity on other platforms, there are games that are sold cheaper on other stores, this is up to the publisher to decide, but most publishers find it easier to have the same price across the board. If this was true games that are exclusive on Epic would be cheaper until they come to Steam years later, but they aren’t.
The mistake happens because there is one specific case in which Valve enforces price parity, but for this you need to know three things:
Valve gives away for free infinite steam keys to publishers
Those keys can be sold by the publisher elsewhere
If they do that the publisher keeps 100% of the revenue of that sale
That sale of that free steam key for which Valve is not charging anything is regulated and can’t be sold cheaper than Steam on regular basis, it can be in a sale for cheaper, but the regular price must match Steam and if it goes on sale outside of Steam eventually it needs to do a similar sale on Steam (but not necessarily at the same time).
So one thing that’s amazing that Valve does for people who publish their games with them is getting them hate because of Epic, please stop spreading missinformation.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
In that link you have one person making a claim without any backing or evidence. Even if that did happen there are multiple possible explanations:
The email was not clear about the other stores not selling keys
The person who answered the email did not understand that they weren’t talking about steam keys
The person answering the email doesn’t know what they’re talking about
Etc
And in that same link you have multiple persons in the comments describing the exact opposite experience providing the same amount of evidence, so if the text on that link is evidence that Valve does that, then the comments there are even more evidence that they don’t.
If only there was a way of knowing… Well, they did say they opened a lawsuit, and those are public record so the email would be there since it’s crucial to the case, without it they would have no case, right? Feel free to read the entire complaint here and you’ll notice the email is suspiciously missing, their claims are that Valve wouldn’t give them more keys to resell, which is directly opposite to what the blog claims.
I can do you one better, Overgrowth is a sequel to Lugaru, which is paid on Steam but free if you install via your package manager on Linux, therefore completely disproving the fact that Steam enforces price parity even for games from this company
You provide a link to someone saying “Valve said they would do X” without evidence, I point out that in that same link you have multiple people saying “Valve told me they would not do X” with the same amount of evidence.
I additionally show you the lawsuit the blog talks about where at no point the supposed email is shown
Additionally I show you another game from the same company that has lower price outside of Steam
Um, I’ve read the complaint from top to bottom and it claims way more than just ‘Valve wouldn’t give them keys to resell’ if they’re not at the same price as on steam. It also claims Valve puts a ‘Price Veto’ clause which allows them to delist games from Steam if the publisher gives bigger sales on other platforms, even if they do not using steam keys, which does sound super uncompetitive to me.
Although I’ll agree the evidence listed in the complaint seem a bit on the light side. Do you know if the trial happened yet? And if so, do you know where I can find what resolution they reached?
Thank you for the link! It helped putting things into proper nuance and context (indcluding throwing away that ridiculous notion that the ‘Steam Store’ and the ‘Steam Gaming Platform’ are two completly different things in different markets).
However, reading the whole thing, it sounds to me like while the court dismissed some of the claims (1 to 4 and 7 apparently), they agreed that Wolfire and the other plaitiffs had the right to ‘plausibly allege unlawful conduct’ about the ‘Most-favored-nations restraints’ (the part where Steam forces publishers to set prices on all stores without steam keys being involved) without mentioning anything more on the subject.
I’m not americain so I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but that means the ruling isn’t over and it’ll go into an appeal court, right?
I’m also not American (well, technically I’m, but you meant from the USA not from the American continent) but yeah, I think it’s still ongoing, although I remember hearing a while back that Valve settled some case, not sure if this one (notice that settling doesn’t mean admitting guilt or that they were going to lose, but sometimes it’s just cheaper to settle than to keep defending yourself (the problem is that on the long run this sends a message that you’re a good target).
Also I believe they would have won the claim that they don’t enforce price parity just by pointing at the other game from Wolfire (Lugaru) which is paid on Steam and free outside of it, and Valve never did anything about it.
That, and Gabe’s hotdog stand has spent decades building customer trust by generally acting decently towards its customers, right after it invented the concept of the hotdog stand.
Making the core of your business model revolve around whining about your competitors doesn’t work so great when your main competitor is already significantly better than you are.
I don’t think we need an article to figure out the answer: Slay the Spire was a megahit and it’s a copycat industry.
I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way either; there’re always plenty of devs finding interesting new angles on the current hot genre and creating genuinely interesting new games in the process, but also a huge number of devs that end up just chasing the trend and releasing something uninspired/derivative.
I really think it deserves its own genre. Games like Cobalt Core, Balatro, Tower Tactics Liberation, Alina of the Arena and Loop Hero are all unique in their own right and differ greatly in gameplay from Slay the Spire and each other but still hold to the deck building rogue-like core.
Slay the spire is the granddaddy of the genre, but isn’t the single defining example by far.
I think the “rogue” in rogue-like refers to the fact that you start over if you die. Not the similarity to the actual game. Am I misunderstanding you?
I think I get what you’re saying, that rogue-like was named after the game and therefore this genre should be named after slay the spire. But I think Rogue named the genre because there wasn’t anything else like it. Slay the Spire is still at the end of the day a mashup of two existing genres.
Rogue was the start of the genre - games that came after we’re always measured against it.
Rogue was a dungeon crawler - a type of game that had been done plenty of times before. Starting over on death had also been done.
But it became genre defining by being the best at both.
Spire I’d say is similar. It is genre defining because the combination of gameplay elements was so perfectly executed that it will become the measuring stick against which all roguelike deck builders will be measured. So Spirelike fits, I think.
The genre can be called “rogue like deck builder” all you want, we all know what it really is: “Spirelike”
Well, you did. And you also directly acknowledged that the genre already has a name in the same sentence.
It seems to be your opinion that it needs another one, even though the name it has is already so well established that it has its own steam tag.
I mean, you’re entitled to have that opinion, and I also understand the logic behind it. But this conversation wasn’t started with “us” saying it needs another name.
I meant that to say, it’s a genre that deserves to be distinguished from just one of the many games that define it.
As a rephrase of that comment, defining the 5 games I listed after one game that basically just came before them would be dishonest because of how different those games all are from Slay the Spire and each other. That’s why the genre is named after what they all have in common, which is a mashup of two existing genres.
What you’re proposing would be like renaming the first person shooter genre to “halo-like” or “call of duty-like” just because those games predate a lot of others and people like them. It’s unnecessary and loses the descriptive quality of the name it has.
I mean, if I was going to go out, then getting my shit mixed by a meteor is pretty awesome. I’m sure I’ll make it on to a few Buzzfeed articles over the next ten or twenty years.
All things considered though, it would indeed be nice if it landed somewhere inconsequential like the ocean; the desert; or Florida.
You jest, but the Kennedy Space Center is in Florida. Putting the world’s busiest spaceport out of commission might put a damper on future asteroid deflection missions…
Hell yeah this would be my choice too on preferred way to die. There’s something beautifully deterministic about it, a random space rock flying around for millions of years and all my lifes choices and circumstances ending up in standing on the exact spot the meteorite ends its journey. Right in my head. Lovely.
I just read the ipcc reports and if you read those and don’t start a bucket list for the time we have left. I don’t know what to tell you. Trust me I don’t want to be this way I will fight where I can but I’m going to live my life the same time way a terminal patient lives. Cherish the days we got and if I’m wrong I will eat crow happily with a big smile on my face.
Honestly, at this point, there might be enough of us volunteering to bounce that fucker back to Jupiter. A lot of us will be turned into jam but I think it’s worth the sacrifice.
It’s false equivalence to claim steam has a monopoly when you’re literally giving epic a monopoly on your games for financial kickbacks between yourselves that in the best case doesn’t impact the user and worst case actively compells them to a much worse platform. What epic and gearbox did is monopolistic, what steam did is just make a good enough product that no one gives a sh*t about EGS. If you want an actual competitive store front, make something your users want, not your business partners. Gog is struggling but it’s still my first goto for games because even if it’s missing all of steams functionality, it gives me ownership of games that can’t just be revoked or broken by publishers. That’s a value add I’m willing to pay for. Paying more so publishers can make more money and sell a worse experience through EGS ain’t moving me.
It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.
Steam did exactly that for years under the “Steam Greenlight” prism where users voted for games to be released on steam with the condition that they would be exclusive. They only stopped it when they decided to go the Amazon route and sell any old shit with zero curation instead.
And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.
But Steam charges nearly triple what Epic does and can depend on gamers to defend them for some reason.
The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.
It makes the cost of developing games more expensive. They have to charge nearly 20% more for games on Steam to make the same money they do on EGS.
It’s also why Valve hardly makes games anymore. They sell 4 games made with other people’s money and they’ll have the same gross income as selling a game they paid to develop. Throw in the cost of development, and they just can’t justify game development as a major part of their business.
The last time they made a full-sized game was Half-life 2, which launched the same day as Steam.
It’s litterally a tunnel shooter with endless repetition to pad it out and pretend it’s a full game, when in reality it’s a tech demo to bundle with VR hardware and try and make Steam the default home of VR games.
This argument about cost of development would hold more weight if the game store savings were passed onto the users rather than just eaten up by the publishers. Borderlands 3 base game has the exact same price on steam vs EGS atm, £49.99. Clearly those 20% savings are just extra money the publisher wants to pocket rather than actual necessary costs to the game. If their happy to pass it off to steam when sold on the steam platform rather than raise the price to recoup the platform tax.
Yes, but with EGS more money goes to the company making the games. AAA games have never been more expensive to produce, and developers are shutting doors left and right. After the costs of marketing and overhead, more of the proceeds of the game are going to the fucking download service than the people making the game when it’s on Steam.
Blame the publishers then. They set the price and they dictate the bonuses of the devs based on sales. Choosing to believe more money from the game store is actually making its way to devs instead of shareholders is naive at best.
And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.
Tim Sweeny didn’t make an offer, he tried to make positive PR to EGS while trying to paint Valve as the bad guys; Valve obviously wouldn’t charge the same rate as Epic because they include a lot more value for both user and developers than Epic does: to list a few of Valve services that Epic doesn’t have:
Steam Workshop (hosting terabytes of content for absolutely free);
Family sharing;
Steam Link for game streaming;
Remote Play Together tech for all the major OSes;
Linux and Wine/Proton investments (which you could argue was an investment because of the Steam Deck, but that’s an investment that benefits everyone, regardless of whether they own a Steam Deck or not);
Cloud save hosting;
Universal controller remapping interface compatible with all the major gamepads;
That’s not to mention the benefits developers can get from Steam’s platform and SDK:
Steam Input (for not needing to deal with custom implementations);
Steam Voice API (for in-game voice chats);
Steam Inventory and Trading Cards, which can result in extra cash for the developers;
Multiple networking options: Steam Game Servers, Steam Matchmaking & Lobbies, Steam Peer-to-peer Networking, etc.
If you ask me, I think Epic is the one charging way too much
The entire greenlight catalog was exclusive. That’s over 100 third-party games, and they only reason it stopped is because they stopped curating products to become the Amazon of online gaming.
Honestly, I won’t bother. I only tried a few Switch games on emulator out of curiosity, and never played long. They don’t make anything interesting enough for me to want. I don’t get why people feel the need for Nintendo.
The mainline Zelda games were fantastic emulated, beautiful with graphics mods and at 1440p/60-120FPS! I also really enjoyed Link’s Awakening. I played Monster Hunter Rise on my regular switch for like 140 hours, but I wish I had waited for the computer version.
I’m definitely passing on Switch 2. I only ever played my Switch docked and always wished I was just playing it in the computer instead.
What other industry is allowed to just do this? Its robbery. If I want to buy an Xbox and mod it to hell I should be able to. At most they should be able to disconnect me from their online infrastructure. Not brick my console.
The only place I’ve seen it is if you didn’t finish paying for it (like getting a fence replaced at your house and then not paying them will get it torn down)
An absurd change followed by rolling it back to an “acceptable” version that is still worse than their original position prior to the initial announcement.
This is a psychological manipulation.
And more to the point it ignores the issue of their violation of trust and consistency.
This is still precedent, they still showed their hand.
They want to have “passive income” at your expense.
If your instance is any indication of location: there’s an eclipse visible in most Oceania and SE Asian islands in 2028. For a good chunk of Australia and NZ, it’ll be a total eclipse. For further info, check it here.
For me (South America) there’s one already in October, but it’ll suck from my region (14% coverage). And another in 2027 (~75% coverage).
The big difference is how close the sun is to solar maximum this year! The sun is at a point of peak electromagnetic activity, something that happens every 10 to 13 years, which is reflected in more chance of witnessing bursts of energy (flares and ejections) during the eclipse.
Me too, the clouds overhead parted just before totality and the corona was so dazzling and magnificent. I really hope there aren’t clouds in the way during this one.
Considering that the standard PS5 is still selling for higher than its launch price 4 years later (despite still facing challenges building up an exclusive library to justify the cost), I’d say that people are just dumb and will pay any price to have their shiny gaming console.
arstechnica.com
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