Going back a ways here with Castlevania: Symphony of The Night. It seems like a fairly fleshed out game as it is when you get to the “final” boss but then you read a guide and find out “ending A” is only half of the game
I had just come off of FFX while running through all the FF games that I could. With FF12, I got to a point where I had a solid amount of freedom and did a bunch of side quests and stuff. Then the next portion of the story takes you to this mountain, and I thought, ah cool, this looks like “new base” material. They lay out new information about the plot and then the next stop is to assault an air ship.
Kick ass, I think. This is probably roughly the story equivalent of the assault on Bevelle from FFX, you go in, fight your way through, a cinematic happens and the thrust of the story changes, new info drops, motivations change and are renewed just like in FFX.
Nope. You get to the boss on that ship, it’s some dude you have little to no investment in fighting. You kick his ass, he transforms, easy fight, and the game just ends.
I sat in actual open mouthed disbelief. There was no way the game ended there, at what I felt was dramatically and game time wise to be the obvious mid point. And yet, there the credits rolled.
I haven’t played since the original release, but I vaguely remember feeling the same way. If I remember correctly you get to the boss and he is practically like who are you guys. I felt so let down there was no build up between the boss and your characters.
And then Square repeated it with FFXV. Whole time I was like why do I care about this villain? Apparently you had to play some side game or read a story to understand why you were meant to care.
With the decision that we needed to play the Kingdom Hearts mobile game to fully understand KH3, I’m starting to not like Square telling us we need to play so many different games to get how KH plot was
If you like the cheesy story, Saints Row the Third is wacky awesome fun. It’s not 100 hours so you’d have to replay it, but you could do that co-op with a couple of friends. There’s nothing quite like bailing out of your fighter jet wearing a hotdog costume and then blowing up half a city block with your rocket launcher on the way down.
Vampire Survivors is a good candidate too, regularly introducing new characters and weapon combos and weird secrets for pretty non-stop dopamine. Maybe you could get 100 hours with the expansions but that seems like a stretch.
Honorable mention to Forza Horizon 4, it’s everything Burnout Paradise wished it could be and had a smile on my face nearly the entire time. Although there were a few spots where I set the difficulty too high and/or didn’t tune up my car and lost races, so that was less fun, but kind of my own fault. Well over 100 hours on this one, but the base game has only come down to $12 and won’t be sold after today!
Was always wary of getting into the Saints Row series because I always like to start with part 1, no matter how different it is and if it was a different set of people making it. But doing this on PC is not as simple as meeting a steam purchase and I already have had plenty to play, so I was reluctant to get into yet another series with more than 2 installments. I’ll see what I feel like later. I’m fairly used to configuring games to work, but I take a lot of time with it.
I’ve already decided to check vampire survivors…
I’m extremely wary of what the state of Forza horizon 4 will be if servers go down—I usually, almost entirely rather, avoid live service and anything with needless dependencies for that reason. It seems the FH4 servers will still be on for years, but even then it is possible that when servers are taken offline, it’ll be before I play it… or play it adequately.
Example: I wanted to start Divinity Original Sin 1 in late 2021. I instead started it in 2024, and have done about a quarter of it only before leaving it alone for a bit. This happens a lot depending on what I’m occupied with in general—and doing all of the classic Divinity games, and not really liking most of them aside from Beyond Divinity which I found decent and Act 1 only of Divinity 2 (the action game) very good, also played a part in that. While there’s no matter of playing the earlier entries, I am going to get a lot busier soon so it seems to be a problem.
For SR3, just do it, it’s a really well-made game and runs great and you don’t need any prior knowledge except to know that it’s kind of a GTA parody. I don’t think SR1 was even ported to PC, and SR2 is pretty buggy and unstable on modern machines (though fun aside from that). SR4 supposed to be pretty great (same engine as 3 I think) but I haven’t played it.
FH4 has a healthy playerbase and I’m pretty confident it’ll still be worth playing over the next year. However beyond that as the community slowly dwindles it will eventually become less fun with fewer people doing Forzathons or seasonal co-ops or using the auctions, even if the servers are still running.
Drag picked up Helldivers recently, which uses a KLA. Drag’s had no problems with it. But drag’s dragon also downloaded it, and it completely borked its computer. The voltage regulator chip for the CPU failed, and its computer started crashing on completely different games, even after uninstalling Helldivers.
Drag uses person-independent pronouns, which are conjugated and inflected the same way in all grammatical persons. When drag uses drag’s pronouns, they’re first person. And to answer your question, drag has a pet dragon. We’re engaged to be married. It’s @HonouraryDragon
Thanks. A lot of people lived through the “singular they” controversy, where conjugation was a big issue, yet they never fully understood the conclusion that conjugation in English depends on the pronoun, not on the inflection. Latin has different rules, of course, but we’re not speaking Latin. A lot of people are still upset about that fact after all these centuries. They’re usually the kind of people who think the Romans were the good guys, and the Goths who spoke a precursor to English were evil. Fun fact: Adolf Hitler hated Gothic script. He called it “Jewish letters”. It’s funny how Germany changed sides over the whole issue. One minute Germany is sacking Rome, and the next they’re the home of the Holy Roman Empire. The whole “Third Reich” thing was an attempt at claiming a lineage descended from Rome. And of course England and the US spent a long time establishing themselves as the inheritors of Rome too. That’s probably why there’s so many old people who want English to be Latin.
Maybe you’re not coming across them regularly but they’re well known outside the corporate world - not to the extent of Microsoft but it’s not the last time they’ll be in the spotlight.
Indeed, not regularly. I only had the pleasure of hearing about them when I had a job that mandated it. They are explicitly targeted at business users.
They literally just urgently requested that everyone update windows 10 and 11 the other day because they found a zero day. Cloudstrike is only unknown if you don’t pay attention to anything privacy related.
I have been an avid gamer since Atari 2600 and IBM PCjr, I have played RPG, shoot-em ups, arcades, stories and FPS.
I had no idea what it was and how to play it, but I opened up my, on sale, US$7.50, new game from a small developer I'd read about named Concerned Ape. Stardew Valley. I have only been playing for 2 years and have 6 different setups i keep going back to for tweaking, and have just started a 7th. The gameplay is straightforward, and oddly addictive. I just added up the hours played on all the games, comes to 1200 hours. Don't know if this fits your bill, but I have been surprised that it is my go to even with the AAA games like Zelda taking a back seat.
Totally agree. Went all-in on Linux earlier this year and it was all working pretty good but there is really no solution when all your buddies are playing fortnite.
The multiple “game streaming” services our there wasn’t really cutting it either. I recall reading that Microsoft was going to be more strict with allowing kernel level anticheat but I don’t remember exactly where in saw that and I’m too lazy to Google. I hope with all the new PC handhelds coming out (steam deck, etc), that major companies start pushing for this or figuring out a workaround.
In the wake of Crowdstrike, Microsoft was going to allow for additional avenues for hooks into the OS that don’t reach as deep into the kernel level, but they never said they were removing the hooks that Crowdstrike or anti-cheat use, as far as I can tell. One solution for PC handhelds is to run whatever modified version of Windows that Microsoft is cooking up, so that you get the console-like interface without compromising on the anti-cheat compatibility. The solution Valve is seemingly hoping for is that, by disclosing kernel-level anti-cheat on the store page, such a solution becomes poison in the marketplace and developers choose a different one.
Steam is a good platform, but if this strategy works and it kills off kernel level anticheat and gets more Linux support, those would be next level contributions to gaming.
The solution Valve is seemingly hoping for is that, by disclosing kernel-level anti-cheat on the store page, such a solution becomes poison in the marketplace and developers choose a different one.
Honestly, I wish they were more aggressive with it. Make the warning banners about kernel-level anti-cheat bright red and put it right above the purchase button like the “needs VR headset” warning.
Previously, my Apex Legends account with hundreds of hours and unlocks got banned for no reason, but I made a new account and played on. Then they banned Linux and I’ve never looked back.
Now I’m looking forward to not being able to play 2XKO as well.
I’m not a target for these hacks (I mostly play like commandos 1.5, Red alert and Diablo II) but I have my main PC on Linux and then a sort of franken-PC on windows where I don’t share sensitive data, or anything meaningful except game-related data I guess.
It is going to be hard to potentially have to make GTA 6 the first one I skip entirely (minus II and London I guess, I never got around to playing those. Or the stories).
I had 2000 hours in SA:MP in the ~one year I actively used xFire. I am an absolute GTA nerd.
I’ll survive it, maybe borrow the console version off a friend who ends up buying it or something. But I know for sure I’ll hate myself for having principles. Or I’ll cave in and hate myself for having principles and caving in.
I plan on waiting until they just make it free 12 times like they did GTA 5,I haven’t enjoyed GTA 5 anyway, they scrapped what made single player good and had a super buggy multiplayer if you had a slower internet, the amount of times it froze and hot stuck in the multiplayer tutorial at my parents because they had a 5/5 so it struggled internet side was insane for something that was already on the system and was still SP
Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously
It is? They're still at 39%. Let's not call victory before reaching the start of the race. Getting to 100% will just be the beginning.
Also, kernel level anti-cheat seems like an easy thing to fix: don't buy the game. Be a little bit more principled and selective in your purchasing choices.
It’s a very recent development, but the consumer actually does have enough information just from the store page these days to know that a game uses kernel level software. The thing that still sucks is that it can be retroactive. In those cases, I suppose we just ask for a refund.
“Don’t buy a game that ships with malware” is a perfectly correct decision, but it doesn’t address the fact that games are shipping with fucking malware.
Let me assure you, if you’re not actually an EU citizen, signing would be a decidedly bad idea. All that would accomplish is pumped numbers that will be disregarded in the end, so it can only serve to hurt the campaign.
I’ve seen the Government in America ignore more than one petition they claimed was tampered with and I wouldn’t want that to be the result here (The EU seems to be more on the up and up than the US government, but still).
This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game, which wouldn’t be an issue if publishers stopped being so greedy and predatory when it comes to player retention, which wouldn’t be an issue if the economic system we live in didn’t promote this toxic behaviour.
So yeah, kernel based anticheats are mostly just a symptom of a larger problem, the rotten video games industry
This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game
This is incredibly false.
Back in the day? Counterstrike 1.6 was SO good that we played through it with rampant hackers everywhere. Finding the rare server where people weren’t using aimbots and wallhacks was a bigger find than a hyper attractive alien asking you to teach it what love is. Same with UT and Quake.
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