Nice to see so much care and effort being put in here, Dremor!
I love the thought, and it makes me feel super happy to see this place getting some more focus. Having well and truly burned my bridges (and enjoyed watching the napalm) on my ‘regular’ social media, having this place as my focus on long-form posts just makes me happy. Makes me even more so to see making this place even better is your plan!
I’m happy to raise my hand to moderate, if you still need extra help. I’d guess not since Lemmy’s workload on a modqueue is a small one. But do feel free to reach out to me via DM if you’d like suggestions/recommendations! Having moderated on Reddit (from giant 10m+ subs to the tiny community-focused ones) I’ve got plenty of ideas to encourage more community involvement?!
Considering how much time and effort you put on your posts, I’m sure you’d make a good moderator. I’d sure need help in the future, as both moderator are temporary (unless they chose otherwhise), and as such I’d use all the help I can to moderate.
I’m finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X. I finished the original Wii U story, which was alright but
spoilerA bit disappointed it ended on a cliffhanger and the unexplained stuff was the thing I was most interested in.
I’m now doing a few of the remaining side quests and I might try fighting some higher level tyrants before continuing with the new chapter.
I tried a couple of roguelikes, it’s a genre I haven’t played much so I was curious to try it:
I tried Hades. The story is probably good, but I just can’t stand the gameplay. I didn’t find the combat to be particularly engaging, it’s too button mashy and none of the weapons feel good to use. I consistently get to Elysium in 25-30 minutes, then die at the boss and end up having to redo everything just for an attempt at fighting them.
Similarly for One Step From Eden, it takes me almost an hour to reach the final boss, for which I’m not ready since it takes so long to get to it. I do prefer the gameplay of this one, there’s more variety in the bosses and there seem to be more options for builds, although I haven’t had success in deviating from the one strategy I found.
I didn’t really find the gameplay of either interesting enough to justify the grind, so I have dropped them.
IIRC they (or at least their design lead) explicitly stated that since the founders were Diablo fans, something like Hades was basically their dream.(And imo you can already see some of that in Bastion and Transistor so I don’t think it was PR talk) So it’s not surprising they’d go for a sequel given how well it was received. But I’m sure they’ll stop soon enough, they don’t seem to be the kind of studio that is in it for the money and I’m sure Hades and Hades 2 are giving them more than enough money to take creative risks in the future.
I got back to Marvel Heroes (tldr: “mmo” diablo-clone with marvel characters), as the private server emulator resurrected the game.
The game got killed ~8 years ago, and every passing year since made my craving for the game that much worse. And late 2024 some absolute madlads released a server emulator, and it’s seems to work great, though the server I’m currently playing is having occasional lag spikes, which isn’t great. I could self-host the server for just for me and/or some friends, but that’d require effort. :D
Anyhoo, got through the story-campaign with my fav marvel character, started looking at the end game … and suddenly I remembered why I stopped playing the game in the first place. It gets pretty grindy. Oh well, I still have a truck load of characters to play - they all play quite differently, give or take some similar ones (like, the thing, hulk, etc bruisers are fairly samey, gun-tooting-heroes also are somewhat similar, but still all of them have their own twist to it). Each max leveled character gives an account-wide exp boost so leveling gets faster and faster. So… gotta churn them levels, I guess. :)
EDIT: oh right, I also finished Kathy Rain, a pretty neat detective point-and-click adventure. I can’t say I had heard of the game before, but as people were frothing about Kathy Rain 2, and the first one was on steep discount, I decided to give it a go… and oh man, worth.
The art, voice acting and gameplay were great. Puzzles were logical for the most part, but there were 2-3 puzzles which did stump me a bit and had to take a peek on a walkthrough - one wasn’t even difficult, but I was overthinking it way too hard and somehow confused red and blue repeatedly, but I guess few beers do affect detective skills… In any case I got through the game with a LONG single session, but I just couldn’t let it go.
Anyhoo, Kathy Rain was pretty dope, eagerly waiting to pick up the sequel later on.
Near-Mage. It’s a point-and-click adventure from the same studio that also made Gibbous, and set in the same world. However, the theme is much lighter. Gibbous was (while still a comedy) about cosmic horror. Near-Mage is fantasy.
While I definitely recommend the game, it is lacking a bit when it comes to riddles. Most point-and-click adventure games have lots of them, where you need to think, give up, and then just try random stuff until something happens. This is almost completely missing in Near-Mage… There is almost always a quest goal that directly tells you what to do - up to the point that situations that give you a choice are explicitly marked as such.
On the other hand, just like Gibbous, the game is beautifully drawn and animated, and all dialogues are fully voiced. The characters are likeable and - call me a furry if you want - really cute. What keeps me playing is mostly the world - there is always new stuff to discover, even in late-game, and the mix of fantasy and (what I assume to be) Romanian folklore is great.
Hades did straight numbers, not a shocker they’d go for another. Couldn’t see Transistor or Bastion getting sequels, (Or Pyre but… lol Pyre.) and more importantly, I’d rather they tell new stories.
tbh, I loved SuperGiant’s themes and aesthetics, but not their gameplay. So often early games of Bastion and Transistor felt squishy, or like I was playing underwater - the response loop from button push to effect on screen seemed laggy. Tried both on various platforms, never really got past that feeling. lovely soundtracks tho
Bastion is a 6/10 beat-em-up with 10/10 art, music, and voice acting. I enjoyed that game a lot (and still listen to the soundtrack on road trips), but boy does the atmosphere carry the weight of an otherwise average game.
Pretty forgivable since it was their first effort. Hades feels nice and crisp while keeping all the other points strong, too.
If we’re adding gaming communities to the sidebar, my list here of gaming genre-specific communities could be helpful.
Can testify to activity of !automationgames and !otomegames as their mod, to !incremental_games as someone with an account there (even if you do not see it from this side, federation issues…), and to !visualnovels, !shmups, !cozygames, and !lifesimulation someone subbed to them. The others might also have activity, including ones I listed as inactive at the time of that post. I sometimes post to the others on the list I am not subbed to if I come across a game in their genre, but I don’t remember off the top of my head.
different people like different things, sounds like your friends like rougish games.
I enjoyed bastion, it was probably my favorite game of its year. I don’t care enough about hades to even give it the time of day, no matter how hot they made zagreus. With few exceptions, I don’t really like rougish games. The few that I do like I’d rather they be long form rpgs so that I can have a build long enough to enjoy it for a while.
That said, studios should be allowed to make the games they want to make. Forcing them to do art against their will results in bad art.
I concur on retrodeck, just a way better experience than emudeck. I like just knowing when I feel like emulating I click retrodeck and boom, it’s all there. Way more cohesive.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne