my husband and I are playing Diablo 4 still. we made our third each character a few days ago and are enjoying the seasonal content. my best friend and I are currently doing her first playthrough of all the kingdom hearts games. it was my first time beating KH1 myself. i finally made it to a world in kingdom hearts 2 after the endless Roxas prologue. we only get a couple hours every weekend, but it’s been really fun. and in between on my own I’m playing pikmin 4.
The first time I played I did it with full color and English dub, and it was good, but it kind of suffers from the “Pick the cat turds out of the sandbox” issue that almost every single one of these games do, where eventually you’re just going from POI to POI on the undiscovered portions of the map and everything gets kind of samey after a while.
I don’t know if playing in Kurosawa mode would be a fresh enough experience to hold me through a second playthrough.
Use gluetun, look up how to configure for your provider. Run a 2nd container for your torrent client, using network_mode: “service:gluetun” to run all your traffic though the vpn. Note that if you’re forwarding ports from your client to e.g. access the web UI, you’ll need to forward them from the gluetun container instead.
If you’re not averse to piracy, you could go that route.
If you are averse to piracy, and have consoles to play on, buy used copies of games (where it’s even possible to) - the publisher sees no proceeds from that.
Failing that… There’s a lot of great indie games out there that aren’t problematic. I know it feels like you’re missing out if you aren’t playing whatever the current big AAA game is, but really, there’s plenty of indie games that are just as good, or that you’d get just as much enjoyment out of.
I'd recommend against piracy in either case. Part of the action you take as a consumer is not just refusing to give Bad Company A your money, but you're also giving Bad Company A's product less attention and mindshare while spending money and attention on Good Company B's product, encouraging more of Good Company B's product to be made. The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, etc. used to be the companies that made games that a lot of us loved, but they trimmed their portfolios of their less profitable (note that I didn't say "unprofitable") games, which means they're not scratching all of the itches they used to scratch, and they've diluted a lot of the games that we still enjoy with business models that encroach right up to the point where they annoy or anger us. So if the business models they're using now piss you off, it's important to stop supporting those and instead show that buying a great product at a fair price is what we as customers want.
For me, if a game requires an internet connection instead of letting us host our own servers or run a LAN or run local play totally offline, I don't buy it, I don't pirate it, I don't play it. I just move on to games that respect their customers.
You know, it’s funny, I used to feel big FOMO when it came to games I wanted to play. Then the Epic Game Store came along, and started paying for timed exclusives, and I adopted the philosophy that I’d just wait for the games to get a Steam release.
There’s only been a handful of instances where I even bothered buying them once they came to Steam; turns out that by not buying them when they’re being hyped by all of the new release marketing, I’ve mentally moved on to other things by the time they come to Steam, and I just don’t feel the need to buy them anymore. I just needed help getting past that initial mental hurdle.
The same applies to companies whose philosophies I object to; as long as I have a reason to mentally justify not buying them initially, I just lose interest in the products entirely very quickly.
People would often respond to me with the sentiment that "games aren't fungible", which is true, but there's so much good stuff out there that something else will be pretty close to the itch you're looking to scratch, great in its own ways, and you don't have to feel lousy about supporting it. Like if Diablo IV feels scummy, I hear Grim Dawn is great. That kind of thing.
I'm a former game dev and I can tell you, at least from my experience, there was no golden age where developers and customers were treated fairly. It's the primary reason why I left. Hell, I once interviewed at a place that showed off how the offices had beds in them, as if that was a selling point.
That said, I'd probably be someone who you'd consider "doesn't care about the bad things these companies did." I'm just too fuckin' old to be mad about shit all of the time. If I was only going to patronize folks and companies who matched my own set of ideals and ethics, I would be more than just gameless. I would be homeless and penniless as well.
What I do is simply detach products and services from those who provide them. I can buy a thing from a person I find distasteful. I don't have to invite them out for a drink and I certainly don't have to avoid taking them to task for their poor or unethical behavior. Moreover, ethics and behavior are saleable. If someone comes around who offers something comparable to something from someone I find distasteful, then I can go patronize the new person instead. I have jumped ship from many service and product providers for that very reason. If you want my business, then you better ensure you're either the only person who can provide what I want or ensure you're the person I want to buy from.
@emeraldheart I'm not frustrated, because it's not a dilemma to me.
Blizzard's glory days are long gone, WOTC does whatever, I had my fun, and J.K. Rowling is a more complex topic. But assuming she's "bad" I'm fine with that too.
The games industry is only bleak if you omit the #indiedev scene. there are so many cool, new games.
E.g. In the last 12 months I have had a blast with Against the Storm, Phantom Brigade and Mechabellum.
Papers, please. This was dystopian but it still felt like it captured the banality of some of communism’s negative side rather than just creating moustache twirling villains.
While the game is pretty fun and the banality is the point, I feel like it doesn’t have a lot of things to say about communism itself. You can swap it out for any failing country and it would just work the same.
While Papers Please is very good, it has more in common with nations in a post-soviet balkanisation than a communist nation. The banality is very present in modern western government as well, and the inability to afford medicine for your child is something that is ripped straight from the modern USA. It is a great approximation of what people imagine due to media conditioning, and that makes it very easy to role-play within the game and really enjoy it.
All in all, amazing game, amazing soundtrack, not really indicative.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne